Probing helium reionization with kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich tomography

Abstract

Reionization of helium is expected to occur at redshifts $z\sim 3$ and have important consequences for quasar populations, galaxy formation, and the morphology of the intergalactic medium, but there is little known empirically about the process. Here we show that kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) tomography, based on the combination of CMB measurements and galaxy surveys, can be used to infer the primordial helium abundance as well as the time and duration of helium reionization. We find a high-significance detection at $\sim 10\sigma$ can be expected from Vera Rubin Observatory and CMB-S4 in the near future. A more robust characterization of helium reionization will require next-generation experiments like MegaMapper (a proposed successor to DESI) and CMB-HD.

4+2 pages, 2 figures, comments welcome

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• Probing light relics through cosmic dawn
• Transverse velocities and matter gradient correlations: a new signal and a new challenge to moving-lens analyses
• Cosmological probes of helium reionization
• Reconstructing patchy helium reionization using the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure
• A Novel kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Estimator for Electron-Electron Correlations