Simulating cosmic rays in clusters of galaxies: I. effects on the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and the X-ray emission

We performed high-resolution simulations of a sample of 14 galaxy clusters that span a mass range from 5 × 1013h−1 M⊙ to 2 × 1015h−1 M⊙ to study the effects of cosmic rays (CRs) on thermal cluster observables such as X-ray emission and the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. We analyse the CR effects on the intra-cluster medium while simultaneously taking into account the cluster’s dynamical state as well as the mass of the cluster. The modelling of the cosmic ray physics includes adiabatic CR transport processes, injection by supernovae and cosmological structure formation shocks, as well as CR thermalization by Coulomb interaction and catastrophic losses by hadronic interactions. While the relative pressure contained in CRs within the virial radius is of the order of 2 per cent in our non-radiative simulations, their contribution rises to 32 per cent in our simulations with dissipative gas physics including radiative cooling, star formation, and supernova feedback. The relative CR pressure rises towards the outer regions due to a combination of the following effects: CR acceleration is more efficient at the peripheral strong accretion shocks compared to weak central flow shocks, adiabatic compression of a composite of CRs and thermal gas disfavours the CR pressure relative to the thermal pressure due to the softer equation of state of CRs, and CR loss processes are more important at the dense centres. Interestingly, in the radiative simulations the relative CR pressure reaches high values of the order of equipartition with the thermal gas in each cluster galaxy due to the fast thermal cooling of gas which diminishes the thermal pressure support relative to that in CRs. This also leads to a lower effective adiabatic index of the composite gas that increases the compressibility of the intra-cluster medium. This effect slightly increases the central density, thermal pressure and the gas fraction. While the X-ray luminosity in low mass cool core clusters is boosted by up to 40 per cent, the integrated Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect appears to be remarkably robust and the total flux decrement only slightly reduced by typically 2 per cent. The resolved Sunyaev-Zel’dovich maps, however, show a larger variation with an increased central flux decrement.