Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Culverhouse, Thomas Louis

Titel

Science targets for the arcminute microkelvin imager

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This thesis is concerned with the science targets for the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI), a twin-array radio interferometer operating at 15GHz, designed to survey for clusters of galaxies using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. It comprises a small array (AMI-SA) of ten 3.7m aerials, and a large array of eight 12.8m dishes (AMI-LA). AMI-SA images the extended SZ effect in clusters on arcmintue scales, while AMI-LA will remove contaminating radio point sources by high-resolution spatial filtering. In this thesis, I begin by presenting commissioning observations as AMI-SA nears completion. This includes the design of both arrays, and moves on to observations of calibrator point sources. I further present the first chapter observations with the telescope. I then describe how best to coordinate the arrays so that AMI cluster surveys will be least affected by source confusion. A method for determining the cluster selection function is then presented, and applied to numerical simulations to determine the number of clusters AMI will detect in a year-long survey. In the next pat of the thesis, I discuss an optical cluster detection algorithm and test its performance on simulated galaxy fields. I then apply it to 3.3 deg2 of two-filter optical data, and present cluster candidates from this mini-survey. Finally, I present theoretical modelling of the ultra-relativistic SZ effect from annihilating dark matter particles in Dwarf Spheroidal galaxies (dSphs), as a potential method for the detection of dark matter. I assess the detectability of the signal, and place it in context of the capabilities of current and future experiments.