Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) Science: Resolving the Hot and Ionized Universe through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect

An omnipresent feature of the multi-phase “cosmic web” is that warm/hot (>10^5 K) ionized gas pervades it. This gas constitutes a relevant contribution to the overall universal matter budget across multiple scales, from the several tens of Mpc-scale IGM filaments, to the Mpc ICM, all the way down to the CGM surrounding individual galaxies, on scales from  1 kpc up to their respective virial radii ( 100 kpc). The study of the hot baryonic component of cosmic matter density represents a powerful means for constraining the intertwined evolution of galactic populations and large-scale cosmological structures, for tracing the matter assembly in the Universe and its thermal history. To this end, the SZ effect provides the ideal observational tool for measurements out to the beginnings of structure formation. The SZ effect is caused by the scattering of the photons from the cosmic microwave background off the hot electrons embedded within cosmic structures, and provides a redshift-independent perspective on the thermal and kinematic properties of the warm/hot gas. Still, current and future (sub)mm facilities have been providing only a partial view of the SZ Universe due to any combination of: limited angular resolution, spectral coverage, field of view, spatial dynamic range, sensitivity. In this paper, we motivate the development of a wide-field, broad-band, multi-chroic continuum instrument for the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) by identifying the scientific drivers that will deepen our understanding of the complex thermal evolution of cosmic structures. On a technical side, this will necessarily require efficient multi-wavelength mapping of the SZ signal with an unprecedented spatial dynamic range (from arcsecond to degree scales) and we employ theoretical forecasts to determine the key instrumental constraints for achieving our goals. [abridged]