E and B modes of the CMB y-type distortions: polarised kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from the reionisation and post-reionisation eras

TL;DR

This paper investigates the polarized E and B modes of the CMB caused by the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect during reionisation, revealing a distinguishable y-type distortion that offers new insights into reionisation history and cosmological parameters.

Contribution

It introduces the second-order polarized kinetic SZ effect's spectrum, decomposing it into blackbody and y-type parts, and demonstrates its potential to probe reionisation and cosmological parameters.

Findings

The y-type distortion is distinguishable from primary and lensing B modes.

The signal is sensitive to the reionisation history and its speed.

The blackbody component could be a foreground for primordial tensor modes.

Abstract

We study the E and B mode polarisation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) originating from the transverse peculiar velocity of free electrons, at second order in perturbation theory, during the reionisation and post-reionisation eras. Interestingly, the spectrum of this polarised kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect can be decomposed into a blackbody part and a y-type distortion. The y-distortion part is distinguishable from the primary E and B modes and also the lensing B modes. Furthermore, it is also differentiable from the other y-type signals, such as the thermal SZ effect, which are unpolarised. We show that this signal is sensitive to the reionisation history, in particular to how fast reionisation happens. The E and B modes of y-type distortion provide a way to beat the cosmic variance of primary CMB anisotropies and are an independent probe of the cosmological parameters. The blackbody component of the pkSZ effect would be an important foreground for the primordial tensor modes for tensor to scalar ratio $r \lesssim 3\times10^{-5}$.