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

The epoch of re-ionization is a milestone of cosmological structure formation, marking the birth of the first objects massive enough to yield large numbers of ionizing photons. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Doppler effect from ionizing bubbles embedded in large-scale velocity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2012-09, Vol.756 (1), p.1-15
Main Authors: Zahn, O, Reichardt, C L, Shaw, L, Lidz, A, Aird, K A, Benson, B A, Bleem, L E, Carlstrom, J E, Chang, C L, Cho, H M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ANGULAR CORRELATION
ANISOTROPY
ASTRONOMY
ASTROPHYSICS
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
Complement
Confidence intervals
Correlation
Cosmic microwave background
COSMOLOGY
DOPPLER EFFECT
EMISSION SPECTRA
GALAXIES
INTERFEROMETRY
IONIZATION
LYMAN LINES
POLARIZATION
RELICT RADIATION
South Pole
TELESCOPES
UNIVERSE
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Summary:The epoch of re-ionization is a milestone of cosmological structure formation, marking the birth of the first objects massive enough to yield large numbers of ionizing photons. 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 re-ionization. Using new multi-frequency data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT), we show that the ionized fraction evolved relatively rapidly. We combine the SPT constraint on the duration of re-ionization with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe measurement of the integrated optical depth to probe the cosmic ionization history. We find that re-ionization ended with 95% confidence at z > 7.2 under the assumption of no tSZ-CIB correlation, and z > 5.8 when correlations are allowed. These CMB observations complement other observational probes of the epoch of re-ionization such as the red-shifted 21 cm line and narrow-band surveys for Ly[alpha]-emitting galaxies.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/756/1/65