Correlating optical and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements of galaxy clusters in the SZA survey

The interferometric cm-wave data from the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array survey were cross-correlated with galaxy clusters identified in a companion R and z' optical imaging program conducted at Kitt Peak National Observatory with the Mosaic-1 camera on the 4m Mayall telescope. These optical data were reduced using pipelines designed for the similar data set of the RCS survey to produce a catalog of clusters. The average SZ signal correlated with this set of clusters and several sub-samples was measured. A negative correlation between the optical and radio data of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array survey was measured at the 1-sigma level. Based on the optical mass proxies of detection significance and richness, the estimated average mass of the cluster sample is approximately 1 x 10 14 solar masses. The average correlated SZ signal is consistent with this estimate, as is the temperature decrement measurement recovered from an MCMC analysis of a beta-model fit to the low-richness clusters. In all, there is a consistent picture of the average SZ signal being able to be recovered for an ensemble of clusters despite the mass of all systems individually being below the detection threshold of the SZA survey.