Inevitable imprints of patchy reionization on the cosmic microwave background anisotropy

Reionization of the cosmic neutral hydrogen by the first stars in theUniverse 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 seminumerical simulations of reionization named SCRIPT. We show that the amplitude of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) and the B-mode polarization signal depends on the patchiness in the spatial distribution of electrons 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 the 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 arising from patchy reionization. We show that the amplitude of the kSZ and the B-mode polarization signal exhibits different dependency on the width of reionization and the patchiness of reionization, and hence a joint study of these CMB probes will be able to break the degeneracy. By combining external data sets from 21-cm measurements, the degeneracy can be further lifted by directly exploring the sizes of the ionized regions.

Automated summary

The research reveals that electron density fluctuations have an impact on the amplitude of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich and B-mode polarization signals in CMB, depending on the spatial distribution of electrons and the midpoint and extent of the reionization history. New scaling relations are established to capture the effects of mean optical depth, reionization width, and spatial fluctuations in electron density arising from patchy reionization.