Reconstructing Patchy Reionization from the Cosmic Microwave Background

TL;DR

This paper presents a new statistical method to extract signals of inhomogeneous reionization from future high-precision CMB data, enabling detailed study of reionization's patchy nature.

Contribution

A novel quadratic estimator is developed to map the inhomogeneous reionization optical depth from CMB temperature and polarization measurements.

Findings

Can constrain reionization parameters at ~10% level

Method separates patchy reionization signal from CMB data

Applicable to future high-sensitivity satellite experiments

Abstract

We introduce a new statistical technique for extracting the inhomogeneous reionization signal from future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization fields. If reionization is inhomogeneous, then the optical depth to recombination will be a function tau(n) of position on the sky. Anisotropies in tau(n) alter the statistics of the observed CMB via several physical mechanisms: screening of the surface of last scattering, generation of new polarization via Thomson scattering from reionization bubbles, and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. We construct a quadratic estimator for the modes of the tau field. This estimator separates the patchy reionization signal from the CMB in the form of a noisy map, which can be cross-correlated with other probes of reionization or used as a standalone probe. A future satellite experiment with sufficient sensitivity and resolution to measure the lensed B-mode on most of the sky can constrain key parameters of patchy reionization, such as the duration of the patchy epoch or the mean bubble radius, at the ~10% level.