2005/04/30 by Matthew McQuinn, Steven R. Furlanetto, Lars Hernquist +4 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/432049
published as Astrophys.J. 630 (2005) 643-656 · 14 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ
arxiv created 2005/06/27 · openalex publication_date 2005/09/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
During the epoch of reionization, local variations in the ionized fraction (patchiness) imprint arcminute-scale temperature anisotropies in the CMB through the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. We employ an improved version of an analytic model of reionization devised by Furlanetto and coworkers to calculate the kSZ anisotropy from patchy reionization. This model uses extended Press-Schechter theory to determine the distribution and evolution of H II bubbles and produces qualitatively similar reionization histories to those seen in recent numerical simulations. We find that the angular power spectrum of the kSZ anisotropies depends strongly on the size distribution of the H II bubbles and on the duration of reionization. In addition, we show that upcoming measurements of the kSZ effect should be able to distinguish between several popular reionization scenarios. In particular, the amplitude of the patchy power spectrum for reionization scenarios in which the IGM is significantly ionized by Population III stars (or by miniquasars/decaying particles) can be larger (or smaller) by over a factor of 3 than the amplitude in more traditional reionization histories (with temperature anisotropies that range between 0.5 and 3 μK at l = 5000). We highlight the differences in the kSZ signal between many possible reionization morphologies and discuss the constraints that future observations of the kSZ will place on this epoch.