Ray-tracing through N-body simulations and CMB anisotropy estimations

The fully nonlinear evolution of galaxy clusters and substructures –given by N-body simulations– is used to simulate maps of the Rees-Sciama (RS) effect. The universe is covered by simulation boxes and photons move across them. A recent technique for ray-tracing through N-body simulations is described in detail and implemented. It is based on the existence of preferred directions (to move photons through the boxes), and also on the use of an appropriate cutoff. By the moment, only small RS maps (around 2×2) have been obtained with this technique. We justify that our ray-tracing procedure is also appropriate in the case of large simulation cubes (∼ 1000 Mpc per edge), where high enough resol…