The asymmetry of dawn: evidence for asymmetric reionization histories from a joint analysis of cosmic microwave background and astrophysical data

TL;DR

This study jointly analyzes CMB and astrophysical data to reveal an asymmetric reionization history, providing tighter constraints on optical depth and challenging symmetric models with high statistical significance.

Contribution

Introduces a novel extended model allowing asymmetric hydrogen reionization histories and demonstrates its consistency with combined CMB and astrophysical data, disfavoring symmetric reionization.

Findings

Optical depth τ=0.0542 with tight constraints

Symmetric reionization hypothesis disfavored at 4σ

Results consistent across different CMB polarization likelihoods

Abstract

We show that by jointly fitting cosmic microwave background (CMB) and astrophysical data - a compilation of UV luminosity data from the Hubble Frontier Field and neutral hydrogen data from distant sources-, we can infer on the shape of the evolution of the ionized hydrogen fraction with redshift in addition to constraining the average optical depth $\tau$.For this purpose, we introduce here a novel extended model that includes hydrogen ionization histories which are monotonic with redshift, but allow for an asymmetry as indicated from our previous works on a free reconstruction of reionization. By using our baseline data combination, we obtain $\tau=0.0542^{+0.0017}_{-0.0028}$, consistent with our previous works and tighter than the one inferred by Planck 2018 data because of the combination of CMB with astrophysical data. We find that the symmetric hypothesis within our parametrization is disfavoured at 4 $\sigma$.We test our findings by using alternative likelihoods for CMB polarization at low multipoles, i.e. based on the 2020 reprocessing of Planck HFI data or on the joint analysis of WMAP and Planck LFI data, obtaining consistent results that disfavour the symmetric hypothesis of the reionization history at high statistical significant level.These results will be further tested by more precise astrophysical data such as from JWST and Euclid deep fields.