Approximate Analytic Spectra of Reionized CMB Anisotropies and Polarization generated by Relic Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical approach to calculate the reionized spectra of CMB anisotropies and polarization caused by relic gravitational waves, exploring simple reionization models and their effects on observable spectra.

Contribution

It introduces approximate analytical formulas for reionized CMB spectra, including dependencies on reionization parameters, and compares these with numerical results to assess accuracy.

Findings

Analytical spectra are accurate within 3% for primary peaks.

Reionization causes a shift in the zero multipole of TE spectra by about 20 multipoles.

Polarization spectra are more sensitive to reionization parameters than temperature spectra.

Abstract

We present an approximate, analytical calculation of the reionized spectra $C_l^{XX}$ of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) anisotropies and polarizations generated by relic gravitational waves (RGWs). Three simple models of reionization are explored, whose visibility functions are fitted by gaussian type of functions as approximations. We have derived the analytical polarization $\beta_l$ and temperature anisotropies $\alpha_l$, both consisting of two terms proportional to RGWs at the decoupling and at the reionization as well. The explicit dependence of $\beta_l$ and $\alpha_l$ upon the reionization time $\eta_r$, the duration $\Delta\eta_r$, and the optical depth $\kappa_r$ are demonstrated. Moreover, $\beta_l$ and $\alpha_l$ contain $\kappa_r$ in different coefficients, and the polarization spectra $C_l^{EE}$ are $C_l^{BB}$ are more sensitive probes of reionization than $C_l^{TT}$. These results facilitate examination of the reionization effects, in particular, the degeneracies of $\kappa_r$ with the normalization amplitude and with the initial spectral index of RGWs. It is also found that reionization also causes a $\kappa_r$-dependent shift $\Delta l\sim 20$ of the zero multipole $l_0$ of $C_l^{TE}$, an effect that should be included in order to detect the traces of RGWs. Compared with numerical results, the analytical $C_l^{XX}$ as approximation have the limitation. For the primary peaks in the range $l\simeq (30, 600)$, the error is $\le 3%$ in three models. In the range $l < 20$ for the reionization bumps, the error is $\le 15%$ for $C_l^{EE}$ and $C_l^{BB}$ in the two extended reionization models, and $C_l^{TT}$ and $C_l^{TE}$ have much larger departures for $l<10$. The bumps in the sudden reionization model are too low.