Observing the Cosmic Web with the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect: from ACT to MISTRAL

This thesis work gravitates around the broad field of the large scale structure and its observation using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, an anisotropic spectral distortion of the CMB that causes a decrement in brightness when observing in the direction of an hot electron population, like the ones contained in galaxy clusters or in cosmic filaments. The first part of this thesis focuses on observing bridges between interacting clusters, i.e. filaments compressed by merging clusters, using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. We survey a preliminary version of the ACT-DR6 cluster catalog in order to search for significant filaments between clusters, and to measure their average properties by stacking. The second part of this work instead focuses on observing clusters and filaments at higher resolution compared to CMB experiments, using high resolution millimeter cameras. We introduce the MISTRAL receiver and follow the steps of its development, from the laboratory calibration to the first observations at the focus of the Sardinia Radio Telescope.