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Register a new userAn Improved Forecast of Patchy Reionization Reconstruction with CMB
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Meng Su
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Inhomogeneous reionization gives rise to angular fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) optical depth tau(n) to the last scattering surface, correlating different spherical harmonic modes and imprinting characteristic non-Gaussianity on CMB maps. Recently the minimum variance quadratic estimator has been derived using this mode-coupling signal, and found that the optical depth fluctuations could be detected with (S/N)^2 ~ 100 in futuristic experiments like CMBPol. We first demonstrate that the non-Gaussian signal from gravitational lensing of CMB is the dominant source of contamination for reconstructing inhomogeneous reionization signals, even with 98% of its contribution removed by delensing. We then construct unbiased estimators that simultaneously reconstruct inhomogeneous reionization signals tau(n) and gravitational lensing potential phi(n). We apply our new unbiased estimators to future CMB experiment to assess the detectability of inhomogeneous reionization signals. With more physically motivated simulations of inhomogenuous reionizations that predict an order of magnitude smaller optical depth power spectrum than previous studies, we show that a CMBPol-like experiment could achieve a marginal detection of inhomogeneous reionization,(S/N)^2 ~ O(1) with this quadratic estimator to ~O(10) with the analogous maximum likelihood estimator.
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B-modes in CMB polarization from patchy reionization arise from two effects: generation of polarization from scattering of quadrupole moments by reionization bubbles, and fluctuations in the screening of E-modes from recombination. The scattering contribution has been studied previously, but the screening contribution has not yet been calculated. We show that on scales smaller than the acoustic scale (l>300), the B-mode power from screening is larger than the B-mode power from scattering. The ratio approaches a constant ~2.5 below the damping scale (l>2000). On degree scales relevant for gravitational waves (l<100), screening B-modes have a white noise tail and are subdominant to the scattering effect. These results are robust to uncertainties in the modeling of patchy reionization.
We present constraints on the patchy reionization by measuring the trispectrum of the Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The patchy reionization leads to anisotropies in the CMB optical depth, and the statistics of the observed CMB anisotropies is altered. We estimate the trispectrum of the CMB temperature anisotropies to constrain spatial variation of the optical depth. We show that the measured trispectrum is consistent with that from the standard lensed CMB simulation at $2sigma$. While no evidence of the patchy reionization is found in the Planck 2015 temperature trispectrum, the CMB constraint on the patchy reionization is significantly improved from previous works. Assuming the analytic bubble-halo model of Wang and Hu (2006), the constraint obtained in this work rules out the typical bubble size at the ionization fraction of $sim0.5$ as $Rgtrsim 10$ Mpc. Further, our constraint implies that large-scale $B$-modes from the patchy reionization are not a significant contamination in detecting the primordial gravitational waves of $rgtrsim0.001$ if the $B$ mode induced by the patchy reionization is described by Dvorkin et al. (2009). The CMB trispectrum data starts to provide meaningful constraints on the patchy reionization.
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The precision anticipated from next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys will create opportunities for characteristically new insights into cosmology. Secondary anisotropies of the CMB will have an increased importance in forthcoming surveys, due both to the cosmological information they encode and the role they play in obscuring our view of the primary fluctuations. Quadratic estimators have become the standard tools for reconstructing the fields that distort the primary CMB and produce secondary anisotropies. While successful for lensing reconstruction with current data, quadratic estimators will be sub-optimal for the reconstruction of lensing and other effects at the expected sensitivity of the upcoming CMB surveys. In this paper we describe a convolutional neural network, ResUNet-CMB, that is capable of the simultaneous reconstruction of two sources of secondary CMB anisotropies, gravitational lensing and patchy reionization. We show that the ResUNet-CMB network significantly outperforms the quadratic estimator at low noise levels and is not subject to the lensing-induced bias on the patchy reionization reconstruction that would be present with a straightforward application of the quadratic estimator.
We present new results from our search for z~7 galaxies from deep spectroscopic observations of candidate z-dropouts in the CANDELS fields. Despite the extremely low flux limits achieved by our sensitive observations, only 2 galaxies have robust redshift identifications, one from its Lyalpha emission line at z=6.65, the other from its Lyman-break, i.e. the continuum discontinuity at the Lyalpha wavelength consistent with a redshift 6.42, but with no emission line. In addition, for 23 galaxies we present deep limits in the Lyalpha EW derived from the non detections in ultra-deep observations. Using this new data as well as previous samples, we assemble a total of 68 candidate z~7 galaxies with deep spectroscopic observations, of which 12 have a line detection. With this much enlarged sample we can place solid constraints on the declining fraction of Ly$alpha$ emission in z~7 Lyman break galaxies compared to z~6, both for bright and faint galaxies. Applying a simple analytical model, we show that the present data favor a patchy reionization process rather than a smooth one.
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