Joining Bits and Pieces of Reionization History

Hazra, Dhiraj Kumar
Paoletti, Daniela
Finelli, Fabio
Smoot, George F.

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Publication date

January 2020

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.071301

Publisher

American Physical Society (APS)

Abstract

International audienceCosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropies from Planck have estimated a lower value of the optical depth to reionization (τ) compared to WMAP. A significant period in the reionization history would then fall within 6<redshift(z)<10, where detection of galaxies with Hubble frontier fields program and independent estimation of neutral hydrogen in the inter galactic medium by Lyman-α observations are also available. This overlap allows an analysis of cosmic reionization which utilizes a direct combination of CMB and these astrophysical measurements and potentially breaks degeneracies in parameters describing the physics of reionization. For the first time we reconstruct reionization histor...