Astroparticle and High Energy Physics

In the context of high-energy phenomena, the research group focuses its attention on effects such as the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. It emerges when the photons of the cosmic microwave background radiation interact via inverse Compton scattering with the highly-energetic electrons in galaxy clusters. 

The interplay between electrons and photons lead to the spectral distortion of the latter. Observations of distorted photons due to this effect in the microwave regime together with the ones of intra-cluster electrons observed in the X-ray domain furnishes estimations of the angular-diameter distances of clusters. In recent research products our research group employed the angular-diameter dis- tances derived from the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect together with other probes to alleviate cosmic degeneracies. These degeneracies arise because different combi- nations of cosmological parameters can produce cosmic microwave background spectra very similar to each others. For example, in one of our works we focused our attention on the degeneracy between baryonic and dark matter abudances whose variations lead to a shift of the location and height of the peaks of the spectrum. 

Moreover, this effect, again in combination with other probes, was used to investigate possible deviations from the cosmic distance duality relation. Specif- ically, checking possible deviations from this relation in light of the recent results probed by the DESI Collaboration can help to investigate further into the nature of the dark energy fluid.