• DOI:10.1093/mnras/staa3221
• Corpus ID: 218595980

Inevitable imprints of patchy reionization on the cosmic microwave background anisotropy

@article{Paul2020InevitableIO,
  title={Inevitable imprints of patchy reionization on the cosmic microwave background anisotropy},
  author={Sourabh Paul and Suvodip Mukherjee and Tirthankar Roy Choudhury},
  journal={Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
  year={2020},
  volume={500},
  pages={232-246}
}

• S. Paul, S. Mukherjee, T. R. Choudhury
• Published 11 May 2020
• Physics
• Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Reionization of the cosmic neutral hydrogen by the first stars in the Universe is an inhomogeneous process which produces spatial fluctuations in free electron density. These fluctuations lead to observable signatures in cosmological probes like the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We explore the effect of the electron density fluctuations on CMB using photon-conserving semi-numerical simulations of reionization named \texttt{SCRIPT}. We show that the amplitude of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) and $B$-mode polarization signal depends on the electron density fluctuations along with the dependence on mid-point and extent of the reionization history. Motivated by this finding, we provide new scaling relations for the amplitude of kSZ and $B$-mode polarization signal which can capture the effects arising from the mean optical depth, width of reionization, and spatial fluctuations in the electron density. We show that the amplitude of the kSZ and $B$-mode polarization signal exhibits different dependency on the width of reionization and spatial fluctuations, and hence a joint study of these CMB probes will be able to break the degeneracy. By combining external datasets from 21~cm measurements, the degeneracy can be further lifted by directly exploring the sizes of the ionized regions.