Small-Scale Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization from Reionization

Abstract

We discuss fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization due to scattering from reionized gas at low redshifts. Polarization is produced by re-scattering of the primordial temperature anisotropy quadrupole and of the kinematic quadrupole that arises from gas motion transverse to the line of sight. We show that both effects produce equal E- and B-parity polarization, and are, in general, several orders of magnitude below the dominant polarization contributions at the last scattering surface to E-modes or the gravitational-lensing contribution to B-modes at intermediate redshifts. These effects are also several orders of magnitude below the B polarization due to lensing even after subtraction with higher-order correlations, and are thus too small to constitute a background for searches for the polarization signature of inflationary gravitational waves.

7 pages, 5 figures; Phys. Rev. D. submitted

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• DASI First Results: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Angular Power Spectrum
• Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies
• Weak Lensing of the CMB: Extraction of Lensing Information from the Trispectrum

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• Searching For Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect Beyond Temperature Anisotropies: CMB E-mode Polarization-Galaxy Cross Correlation
• Cosmology from the kinetic polarized Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect
• Cross-Correlation Studies with CMB Polarization Maps
• A framework to mitigate patchy reionization contamination on the primordial gravitational wave signal
• The Polarization Signature of Local Bulk Flows
• E and B modes of the CMB y-type distortions: polarised kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from the reionisation and post-reionisation eras