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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 2(598), p. 756-766, 2003

DOI: 10.1086/378772

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Small-Scale Cosmic Microwave Background Temperature and Polarization Anisotropies Due to Patchy Reionization

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We study contributions from inhomogeneous (patchy) reionization to arcminute-scale (1000 < l < 10,000) cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. We show that inhomogeneities in the ionization fraction, rather than in the mean density, dominate both the temperature and the polarization power spectra. Depending on the ionization history and the clustering bias of the ionizing sources, we find that rms temperature fluctuations range from 2 to 8 μK and the corresponding values for polarization are over 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Reionization can significantly bias cosmological parameter estimates and degrade gravitational lensing potential reconstruction from temperature maps but not from polarization maps. We demonstrate that a simple modeling of the reionization temperature power spectrum may be sufficient to remove the parameter bias. The high-l temperature power spectrum will contain some limited information about the sources of reionization.