Constraining CMB temperature evolution with Sunyaev-Zeldovich galaxy clusters from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope

The Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect introduces a specific distortion of the blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation when it scatters off hot gas in clusters of galaxies. The frequency dependence of the distortion is only independent of the cluster redshift when the evolution of the CMB radiation is adiabatic. Using 370 clusters within the redshift range $0.07lesssim zlesssim1.4$ from the largest SZ-selected cluster sample to date from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, we provide new constraints on the deviation of CMB temperature evolution from the standard model $alpha=0.017^{+0.029}_{-0.032}$, where $T(z)=T_0(1+z)^{1-alpha}$. This result is consistent with no deviation from the standard adiabatic model. Combining it with previous, independent datasets we obtain a joint constraint of $alpha=-0.001pm0.012$.