Probing the Physics of Reionization Using kSZ Power Spectrum from Current and Upcoming CMB Surveys

TL;DR

This paper explores how future measurements of the kSZ power spectrum from upcoming CMB surveys can significantly improve our understanding of the reionization process, especially its timing and duration.

Contribution

It demonstrates that advanced foreground mitigation and high-precision kSZ measurements will enable stringent, prior-independent constraints on reionization parameters using current and upcoming CMB data.

Findings

High signal-to-noise kSZ detection achievable with future surveys.

Potential to constrain reionization midpoint with ~0.25 error.

Ability to measure reionization duration with ~0.21 error.

Abstract

The patchiness in the reionization process alters the statistics of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), with the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect in the CMB temperature power spectrum being a notable consequence. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of future kSZ power spectrum measurements in inferring the details of the reionization process. In this pursuit, we capitalize on the recent developments in foreground mitigation techniques using the Cross-Internal Linear Combination (Cross-ILC) technique, which enables robust detection of the kSZ power spectrum with signal-to-noise ($S/N$) roughly $20-30\sigma$ in this decade by SPT-3G and Simons Observatory (SO); and $\geq 80\sigma$ by CMB-S4, substantially improving on the recent evidence for kSZ binned at $\ell=3000$ using SPT-SZ+SPTpol surveys. We use a fiducial kSZ power spectrum along with realistic error bars expected from the above technique for SPT-3G, SO, and CMB-S4 to constrain the parameter space for a physical model of reionization. We find that with the improved error bars it will be possible to place stringent constraints on reionization using solely the Cross-ILC recovered SPT-3G kSZ without imposing any prior on $\tau$ in the Bayesian inference. Notably, high-fidelity kSZ measurements from CMB-S4 coupled with $\tau$ measurements through LiteBIRD will enable unprecedented constraint on the midpoint of reionization with an error bar of $\sim 0.25$ and the duration of reionization with an error bar at $\sim 0.21$ exclusively using CMB data. This study highlights the need to capture kSZ power spectrum on a broad range of multipoles to gain insights into the inhomogeneous reionization era.