Astrophysical constraints from future measurements of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich power spectrum

TL;DR

Future high-precision CMB measurements of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect can significantly constrain reionisation-era galaxy properties and provide an independent estimate of the CMB optical depth, enhancing our understanding of the Epoch of Reionisation.

Contribution

This work demonstrates that kSZ power spectrum measurements can constrain astrophysical parameters of reionisation, using neural network emulators and mock CMB observations.

Findings

kSZ measurements can constrain ionising escape fraction to 14% accuracy

kSZ provides an independent measurement of CMB optical depth

emulator errors dominate current forecast uncertainties

Abstract

High-precision measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) will soon allow for the unprecedented detection of small-scale secondary anisotropies, such as the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. Linking the kSZ power spectrum to the properties of ionising sources would provide an opportunity to use such observations to access astrophysical and cosmological information from the Epoch of Reionisation, including the morphology of ionised regions, while simultaneously improving CMB analyses. The aim of this work is to assess this potential of the kSZ power spectrum to measure reionisation-era galaxy properties. We repurpose the publicly available LoReLi II simulations, which track the evolution of neutral hydrogen during reionisation, to generate a training set of patchy kSZ angular power spectra. We then train an emulator using neural network regression in order to allow for efficient Bayesian inference, and conduct forecasts assuming mock observations from current and future CMB experiments. We find that measurements of the kSZ power spectrum from such surveys can provide meaningful constraints on several of the astrophysical model parameters of the LoReLi II suite, including the ionising escape fraction for which we expect a 14% relative error, on average. They also provide an independent measurement of the CMB optical depth, marginalised over the astrophysics and with error bars competitive with the cosmic variance limit from large scale surveys. The kSZ power spectrum offers a promising avenue for probing the properties of reionisation-era galaxies and providing an independent measurement of the CMB optical depth with upcoming CMB experiments. Since the error budget of our mock observations is dominated by emulator reconstruction errors, we expect our results could be further improved with a more extended simulation training set.