Observing the clustering properties of galaxy clusters in dynamical dark-energy cosmologies

¹ Dipartimento di Astronomia, Università di Bologna, via Ranzani 1, 40127 Bologna, Italy e-mail: cosimo.fedeli@unibo.it
² INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, via Ranzani 1, 40127 Bologna, Italy
³ INFN, Sezione di Bologna, viale Berti Pichat 6/2, 40127 Bologna, Italy
⁴ Zentrum für Astronomie, ITA, Universität Heidelberg, Albert-Überle-Str. 2, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

Received: 5 December 2008
Accepted: 21 March 2009

Abstract

We study the clustering properties of galaxy clusters expected to be observed by various forthcoming surveys both in the X-ray and sub-mm regimes by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Several different background cosmological models are assumed, including the concordance ΛCDM and various cosmologies with dynamical evolution of the dark energy. Particular attention is paid to models with a significant contribution of dark energy at early times which affects the process of structure formation. Past light cone and selection effects in cluster catalogs are carefully modeled by realistic scaling relations between cluster mass and observables and by properly taking into account the selection functions of the different instruments. The results show that early dark-energy models are expected to produce significantly lower values of effective bias and both spatial and angular correlation amplitudes with respect to the standard ΛCDM model. Among the cluster catalogs studied in this work, it turns out that those based on eRosita, Planck, and South Pole Telescope observations are the most promising for distinguishing between various dark-energy models.