Reionization in the dark and the light from Cosmic Microwave Background

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how current and future CMB data constrain the history of reionization, exploring degeneracies with neutrino mass and dark matter properties, and assesses the impact of higher resolution observations.

Contribution

It introduces an extended poly-reion model to better constrain reionization history and forecasts the improvements from future CMB missions like LiteBIRD and CORE.

Findings

Degeneracy between optical depth and reionization duration will be reduced by future data.

Constraints on neutrino mass and dark matter properties will improve with upcoming surveys.

Higher resolution observations offer limited gains for long-duration reionization scenarios.

Abstract

We explore the constraints on the history of reionization from Planck 2015 Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data and we derive the forecasts for future CMB observations. We consider a class of monotonic histories of reionization as parametrized by two additional extra parameters with respect to the average optical depth used in the instantaneous reionization modeling. We investigate the degeneracies between the history of reionization and selected extensions of the standard cosmological model. In particular, we consider the degeneracies with the total mass of the neutrino sector and we discuss the possible correlation between the dark matter annihilation and the duration of reionization in the CMB. We use an extension to poly-reion model that was proposed in Hazra and Smoot, JCAP 1711, 028 (2017). We compare the constraints from Planck 2015 data with the predicted constraints from possible future CMB mission as LiteBIRD, and we also use the proposed CORE-like specifications as an example of what higher resolution can bring in addition. We find that the degeneracy between the average optical depth and the duration of reionization will be substantially removed by both concepts. Degeneracies between the reionization history and either the total neutrino mass and properties of dark matter annihilation will also be improved by future surveys. We find only marginal improvement in the constraints on reionization history for the higher resolution in the case of long duration of reionization.