The Signature of Patchy Reionization in the Polarization Anisotropy of the CMB

Abstract

The inhomogeneous ionization state of the universe when the first sources of ionizing radiation appeared should lead to anisotropies in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. We use cosmological simulations of the process by which the first sources ionized the intergalactic medium to study the induced polarization anisotropies. We find that the polarization anisotropies have rms of order ~0.01 μK, and local peak values of ~0.1 μK, smaller than those due to gravitational lensing on small scales. The polarization direction is highly coherent over degree scales. This directional coherence is not expected from either primary anisotropy or gravitational lensing effects, making the largest signals due to inhomogeneous ionization relatively easy to isolate, should experiments achieve the necessary very low noise levels.

11 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PRD

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• The Benefits of CMB Delensing
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• B-mode CMB Polarization from Patchy Screening during Reionization
• Mitigating the optical depth degeneracy using the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with CMB-S4
• Kinetic Sunyaev Zeldovich effect in an anisotropic CMB model: measuring low multipoles of the CMB at higher redshifts using intensity and polarization spectral distortions
• Radiation-induced large-scale structure during the reionization epoch: the autocorrelation function
• Reconstructing Patchy Reionization with Deep Learning
• Is patchy reionization an obstacle in detecting the primordial gravitational wave signal?
• Inference of gravitational lensing and patchy reionization with future CMB data
• Reconstructing Cosmic Polarization Rotation with ResUNet-CMB
• Unified approach to secondary effects on the CMB B-mode polarization
• Reionization: Characteristic Scales, Topology and Observability
• Linear Polarization of the 21 cm Line from the Epoch of Reionization
• Reconstructing patchy helium reionization using the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure
• Secondary B-mode polarization from Faraday rotation in clusters and galaxies
• Gamma-Ray Absorption By The Cosmic Lyman Continuum From Star-forming Galaxies
• CMB anisotropies from patchy reionisation and diffuse Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects