COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND CONSTRAINTS ON THE DURATION AND TIMING OF REIONIZATION FROM THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE

By Oliver Zahn, C. Reichardt, L. Shaw, A. Lidz, K. Aird, B. Benson, L. Bleem, J. Carlstrom, C. Chang, Hsiao-mei Cho and 41 more. 2011

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The epoch of reionization is a milestone of cosmological structure formation, marking the birth of the first objects massive enough to yield large numbers of ionizing photons. However, the mechanism and timescale of reionization remain largely unknown. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Doppler effect from ionizing bubbles embedded in large-scale velocity streams—known as the patchy kinetic Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect—can be used to constrain the duration of reionization. When combined with large-scale CMB polarization measurements, the evolution of the ionized fraction, , can be inferred. Using new multi-frequency data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT), we show that the ionized fraction evolved relatively rapidly. For our basic foreground model, we find the kSZ power sourced by reionization at ℓ = 3000 to be Dpatchy3000 ⩽ 2.1 μK2 at 95% confidence. Using reionization simulations, we translate this to a limit on the duration of reionization of (95% confidence). We find that this constraint depends on assumptions about the angular correlation between the thermal SZ power and the cosmic infrared background (CIB). Introducing the degree of correlation as a free parameter, we find that the limit on kSZ power weakens to Dpatchy3000 ⩽ 4.9 μK2, implying Δz ⩽ 7.9 (95% confidence). We combine the SPT constraint on the duration of reionization with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe measurement of the integrated optical depth to probe the cosmic ionization history. We find that reionization ended with 95% confidence at z > 7.2 under the assumption of no tSZ–CIB correlation, and z > 5.8 when correlations are allowed. Improved constraints from the full SPT data set in conjunction with upcoming Herschel and Planck data should detect extended reionization at >95% confidence provided Δz ⩾ 2. These CMB observations complement other observational probes of the epoch of reionization such as the redshifted 21 cm line and narrowband surveys for Lyα-emitting galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea5aedafc06b87dab59a320234e901db12f9e169

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Citations in the corpus

Planck 2015 results: XXIII. The thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect-cosmic infrared background correlation (2015, unknown): “Recently, efforts have been made to model the tSZ-CIB correlation (e.g., Zahn et al. 2012; Addison et al. 2012).”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “The kinetic SZ spectrum is based on the fiducial model in Zahn et al. (2012).”
Model-independent evidence in favour of an end to reionization by z ≈ 6 (2014, background): “Email: imcgreer@as.arizona.edu 1998; Songaila & Cowie 2002; Gallerani et al. 2006, 2008; Mesinger 2010); (v) the integral constraints provided by the CMB primary (e.g. Hinshaw et al. 2013) and secondary (e.g. Zahn et al. 2012; Mesinger et al. 2012) anisotropies.”
PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS ON REIONIZATION: THE 21 cm POWER SPECTRUM AT z = 8.4 (2015, background): “…(Planck Collaboration et al. 2014, 2015), large-scale CMB polarization anisotropies (Page et al. 2007), and secondary temperature fluctuations generated by the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect (Mesinger et al. 2012; Zahn et al. 2012; Battaglia et al. 2013; Park et al. 2013; George et al. 2014).”
The birth of a galaxy – III. Propelling reionization with the faintest galaxies (2014, methodology): “Third, the duration1 of reionization has been constrained to occur within z < 7.9 by measuring the kinetic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect with the South Pole Telescope (Zahn et al. 2012).”
A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES FROM THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, background): “Constraints on the kSZ power spectrum can therefore lead to interesting constraints on the epoch of reionization (Mortonson & Hu 2010; Zahn et al. 2012; Mesinger et al. 2012).”
SPTpol: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements with the South Pole Telescope (2012, background): “Measurements on these scales will also provide constraints on the evolution of the ionized fraction during the epoch of reionization through the kinetic SZ effect.(9,25) Comparing the gravitational lensing of the CMB to galaxy surveys or other external mass tracers provides another source of constra”
Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn with the Square Kilometre Array (2012, background): “The SPT results are starting to put limits on the duration of reionization (Zahn et al. 2012).”
The Evolution of the Intergalactic Medium (2015, background): “In physical scales, ` ≈ 3000 roughly probes angular separations of θ = 2π/` = 7′ or comoving distances of DA(z = 10)× θ = 20 comoving Mpc. 38 Matthew McQuinn at a secondary level (Zahn et al. 2012; Mesinger, McQuinn & Spergel 2012; Park et al. 2013).”
NEW CONSTRAINTS ON COSMIC REIONIZATION FROM THE 2012 HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD CAMPAIGN (2013, methodology): “Formally, our best-fit model has∆z ∼ 5, according to the definition of Zahn et al. (2012), which is within the range that can be constrained if the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich contamination can be sorted out.”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, unknown): “Recently Zahn et al. (2012) obtained ∆ z < 7 .”
Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) (2016, background): “But even with these measurements, the detailed evolution of the IGM is only loosely constrained (Haiman & Holder 2003; Mortonson & Hu 2008; Zahn et al. 2012; Mesinger et al. 2012).”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: likelihood for small-scale CMB data (2013, background): “As a result, neglecting this component can lead to artiﬁcially tight constraints on the kSZ power (Zahn et al. 2012; Mesinger et al. 2012).”
21CMMC: an MCMC analysis tool enabling astrophysical parameter studies of the cosmic 21 cm signal (2015, methodology): “In future, we will explicitly include a generalized redshift evolution for EoR parameters (e.g. Barkana 2009; Mesinger et al. 2012; Zahn et al. 2012).”
A simulation-calibrated limit on the H i power spectrum from the GMRT Epoch of Reionization experiment (2013, methodology): “Using the global 21 cm signal as a function of redshift, Bowman & Rogers (2010) have put a lower limit on the duration of the EoR of z > 0.06, while Zahn et al. (2012) have used measurements of the kinetic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect with the South Pole Telescope to suggest an upper limit on the…”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: temperature and gravitational lensing power spectrum measurements from three seasons of data (2013, methodology): “…to the power spectrum, as well as to model the cosmic infrared background (CIB) power spectrum arising from the mm-wave emission from dusty high redshift galaxies (Hall et al. 2010; Dunkley et al. 2011; Addison et al. 2012b,a; Hajian et al. 2012; Reichardt et al. 2012; Zahn et al. 2012).”