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Register a new userCosmic Microwave Background Polarization and reionization: constraining models with a double reionization
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Added by
Loris P. L. Colombo
Publication date
2004
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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Neutral hydrogen around high-z QSO and an optical depth tau ~ 0.17 can be reconciled if reionization is more complex than a single transition at z ~ 6-8. Tracing its details could shed a new light on the first sources of radiation. Here we discuss how far such details can be inspected through planned experiments on CMB large-scale anisotropy and polarization, by simulating an actual data analysis. By considering a set of double reionization histories of Cen (2003) type, a relevant class of models not yet considered by previous works, we confirm that large angle experiments rival high resolution ones in reconstructing the reionization history. We also confirm that reionization histories, studied with the prior of a single and sharp reionization, yield a biased tau, showing that this bias is generic. We further find a monotonic trend in the bias for the models that we consider, and propose an explanation of the trend, as well as the overall bias. We also show that in long-lived experiments such a trend can be used to discriminate between single and double reionization patterns.
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The temperature anisotropies and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a window back to the physics of the early universe. They encode the nature of the initial fluctuations and so can reveal much about the physical mechanism that led to their generation. In this contribution we review what we have learnt so far about early-universe physics from CMB observations, and what we hope to learn with a new generation of high-sensitivity, polarization-capable instruments.
By using N-body hydrodynamical cosmological simulations in which the chemistry of major metals and molecules is consistently solved for, we study the interaction of metallic fine-structure lines with the CMB. Our analysis shows that the collisional induced emissions in the OI 145 $mu$m and CII 158 $mu$m lines during reionization introduce a distortion of the CMB spectrum at low frequencies ($ u < 300$ GHz) with amplitudes up to $Delta I_{ u}/B_{ u}(T_{rm CMB})sim 10^{-8}$-$10^{-7}$, i.e., at the $sim 0.1$ percent level of FIRAS upper limits. Shorter wavelength fine-structure transitions (OI 63 $mu$m, FeII 26 $mu$m, and SiII 35 $mu$m) typically sample the reionization epoch at higher observing frequencies ($ u > 400$ GHz). This corresponds to the Wien tail of the CMB spectrum and the distortion level induced by those lines may be as high as $Delta I_{ u}/B_{ u}(T_{rm CMB})sim 10^{-4}$. The angular anisotropy produced by these lines should be more relevant at higher frequencies: while practically negligible at $ u=145 $GHz, signatures from CII 158 $mu$m and OI 145 $mu$m should amount to 1%-5% of the anisotropy power measured at $l sim 5000$ and $ u=220 $GHz by the ACT and SPT collaborations (after assuming $Delta u_{rm obs}/ u_{rm obs}simeq 0.005$ for the line observations). Our simulations show that anisotropy maps from different lines (e.g., OI 145 $mu$m and CII 158 $mu$m) at the same redshift show a very high degree ($>0.8$) of spatial correlation, allowing for the use of observations at different frequencies to unveil the same snapshot of the reionization epoch. Finally, our simulations demonstrate that line-emission anisotropies extracted in narrow frequency/redshift shells are practically uncorrelated in frequency space, thus enabling standard methods for removal of foregrounds that vary smoothly in frequency, just as in HI 21 cm studies.
The Cosmic Dark Ages and the Epoch of Reionization constitute a crucial missing link in our understanding of the evolution of the intergalactic medium and the formation and evolution of galaxies. Due to the complex nature of this global process it is best studied through large-scale numerical simulations. This presents considerable computational challenges. The dominant contributors of ionizing radiation were dwarf galaxies. These tiny galaxies must be resolved in very large cosmological volumes in order to derive their clustering properties and the corresponding observational signatures correctly, which makes this one of the most challenging problems of numerical cosmology. We have recently performed the largest and most detailed simulations of the formation of early cosmological large-scale structures and their radiative feedback leading to cosmic reionization. This was achieved by running extremely large (up to 29 billion-particle) N-body simulations of the formation of the Cosmic Web, with enough particles and sufficient force resolution to resolve all the galactic halos with total masses larger than 10^8 Solar masses in computational volumes of up to (163 Mpc)^3. These results were then post-processed by propagating the ionizing radiation from all sources by using fast and accurate ray-tracing radiative transfer method. Both of our codes are parallelized using a combination of MPI and OpenMP and to this date have been run efficiently on up to 2048 cores (N-body) and up to 10000 cores (radiative transfer) on the newly-deployed Sun Constellation Linux Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. In this paper we describe our codes, parallelization strategies, scaling and some preliminary scientific results. (abridged)
The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER) is a rocket-borne absolute photometry imaging and spectroscopy experiment optimized to detect signatures of first-light galaxies present during reionization in the unresolved IR background. CIBER-I consists of a wide-field two-color camera for fluctuation measurements, a low-resolution absolute spectrometer for absolute EBL measurements, and a narrow-band imaging spectrometer to measure and correct scattered emission from the foreground zodiacal cloud. CIBER-I was successfully flown on February 25th, 2009 and has one more planned flight in early 2010. We propose, after several additional flights of CIBER-I, an improved CIBER-II camera consisting of a wide-field 30 cm imager operating in 4 bands between 0.5 and 2.1 microns. It is designed for a high significance detection of unresolved IR background fluctuations at the minimum level necessary for reionization. With a FOV 50 to 2000 times largerthan existing IR instruments on satellites, CIBER-II will carry out the definitive study to establish the surface density of sources responsible for reionization.
Dark matter constitutes the great majority of the matter content in the Universe, but its microscopic nature remains an intriguing mystery, with profound implications for particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Here we shed light on the longstanding issue of whether the dark matter is warm or cold by combining the measurements of the galaxy luminosity functions out to high redshifts z~10 from the Hubble Space Telescope with the recent cosmological data on the reionization history of the Universe from the Planck mission. We derive robust and tight bounds on the mass of warm dark matter particle, finding that the current data require it to be in the narrow range between 2 and 3 keV. In addition, we show that a mass not exceeding 3 keV is also concurrently indicated by astrophysical constraints related to the local number of satellites in Milky Way-sized galaxies, though it is in marginal tension with analysis of the Lyman-alpha forest. For warm dark matter masses above 3 keV as well as for cold dark matter, to satisfy the Planck constraints on the optical depth and not to run into the satellite problem would require invoking astrophysical processes that inhibit galaxy formation in halos with mass M_H< a few 10^8 M_sun, corresponding to a limiting UV magnitude M_UV~-11. Anyway, we predict a downturn of the galaxy luminosity function at z~8 faintward of M_UV~-12, and stress that its detailed shape is extremely informative both on particle physics and on the astrophysics of galaxy formation in small halos. These expectations will be tested via the Hubble Frontier Fields and with the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will enable probing the very faint end of the galaxy luminosity function out to z~8-10.
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