The Kinematic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect: From Inflation to Baryonic Feedback
The kinematic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (kSZ) effect is a secondary anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), arising from Doppler shifts induced by the line-of-sight motion of free electrons. With recent detections exceeding 20σ significance, the kSZ effect is rapidly emerging as a powerful and versatile probe of large-scale structure. In this talk, I will review how kSZ estimators extract this signal by combining CMB observations with galaxy surveys. I will highlight recent advances, including three-dimensional reconstructions of the cosmic velocity field and kSZ cross-correlation measurements, which are enabling increasingly precise studies of structure formation. These measurements can be used to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity, probe the growth of structure, and trace the distribution of ionized gas. Finally, I will discuss the outlook for kSZ science with upcoming surveys, including the Simons Observatory, and the prospects for jointly constraining fundamental physics and baryonic processes in the next generation of experiments.
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