Precision epoch of reionization studies with next-generation CMB experiments

Abstract

Future arcminute resolution polarization data from ground-based Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations can be used to estimate the contribution to the temperature power spectrum from the primary anisotropies and to uncover the signature of reionization near l=1500 in the small angular-scale temperature measurements. Our projections are based on combining expected small-scale E-mode polarization measurements from Advanced ACTPol in the range 300 < l < 3000 with simulated temperature data from the full Planck mission in the low and intermediate l region, 2 < l < 2000 . We show that the six basic cosmological parameters determined from this combination of data will predict the underlying primordial temperature spectrum at high multipoles to better than 1% accuracy. Assuming an efficient cleaning from multi-frequency channels of most foregrounds in the temperature data, we investigate the sensitivity to the only residual secondary component, the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (kSZ) term. The CMB polarization is used to break degeneracies between primordial and secondary terms present in temperature and, in effect, to remove from the temperature data all but the residual kSZ term. We estimate a 15 sigma detection of the diffuse homogeneous kSZ signal from expected AdvACT temperature data at l > 1500 , leading to a measurement of the amplitude of matter density fluctuations, sigma(8), at 1% precision. Alternatively, by exploring the reionization signal encoded in the patchy kSZ measurements, we bound the time and duration of the reionization with sigma(z(re)) = 1.1 and sigma(Delta z(re)) = 0.2 . We find that these constraints degrade rapidly with large beam sizes, which highlights the importance of arcminute-scale resolution for future CMB surveys.