ISW KSZ Directional Templates

The kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect encodes the line-of-sight momentum of ionized gas bulk flows, and when combined with ISW temperature-galaxy cross-correlations, it allows reconstruction of the three-dimensional velocity and gravitational potential fields. Template-based analyses using these combined probes have found directional anomalies: the reconstructed fields show preferred orientations and amplitude asymmetries that are inconsistent with ΛCDM's statistically isotropic prior. SCT anticipates this finding directly. The collision geometry imprints a preferred axis on both the large-scale velocity field — through angular momentum inheritance — and on the gravitational potential landscape — through the spatially varying tensor mesh. The kSZ bulk flow therefore carries a coherent directional signal aligned with the collision axis, while the ISW signal has an amplitude gradient correlated with proximity to the KBC Supervoid center.

The gravitational superposition effect further modulates the template amplitudes: in directions toward dense supercluster nodes, the effective gravitational potential is deeper than ΛCDM's particle-only prediction, while in void directions it is shallower. Cross-correlating ISW and kSZ directional templates with these SCT-predicted modulations should reveal a coherent pattern — higher kSZ amplitude toward matter concentrations enhanced by superposition, and a suppressed ISW signal in void directions where Λ_eff is elevated. ΛCDM has no mechanism to produce this correlated directionality because it lacks both the preferred collision axis and the spatially inhomogeneous dark energy analog that SCT provides.