Probing the Physics of Reionization Using kSZ Power Spectrum from Current and Upcoming CMB Surveys

Understand

The patchiness in the reionization process alters the statistics of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), with the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect in the CMB temperature power spectrum being a notable consequence.

• In this work, we aim to explore the potential of future kSZ power spectrum measurements in inferring the details of the reionization process.
• In this pursuit, we capitalize on the recent developments in foreground mitigation techniques using the Cross-Internal Linear Combination (Cross-ILC) technique, which enables robust detection of the kSZ power spectrum with signal-to-noise ($S/N$) roughly $20-30\sigma$ in this decade by SPT-3G and Simons Observatory (SO); and $\geq 80\sigma$ by CMB-S4, substantially improving on the recent evidence for kSZ binned at $\ell=3000$ using SPT-SZ+SPTpol surveys.
• We use a fiducial kSZ power spectrum along with realistic error bars expected from the above technique for SPT-3G, SO, and CMB-S4 to constrain the parameter space for a physical model of reionization.