Journal article
Cosmic microwave background constraints on the duration and timing of reionization from the south pole telescope
O Zahn, CL Reichardt, L Shaw, A Lidz, KA Aird, BA Benson, LE Bleem, JE Carlstrom, CL Chang, HM Cho, TM Crawford, AT Crites, T De Haan, MA Dobbs, O Doré, J Dudley, EM George, NW Halverson, GP Holder, WL Holzapfel Show all
Astrophysical Journal | IOP Publishing Ltd | Published : 2012
Abstract
The epoch of reionization is a milestone of cosmological structure formation, marking the birth of the first objects massive enough to yield large numbers of ionizing photons. However, the mechanism and timescale of reionization remain largely unknown. 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 reionization. When combined with large-scale CMB polarization measurements, the evolution of the ionized fraction, xe, can be inferred. Using new multi-frequency data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT), we show th..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Matt George, Guilaine Lagache, Cien Shang, David Spergel, Marco Viero, and Matias Zaldarriaga for useful discussions. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants ANT-0638937 and ANT-0130612. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. O. Zahn acknowledges support from a Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics fellowship. The McGill group acknowledges funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chairs program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. R. Keisler acknowledges support from NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HF-51275.01. B. A. Benson is supported by a KICP Fellowship. M. Dobbs acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. L. Shaw acknowledges the support of Yale University and NSF grant AST-1009811. M. Millea and L. Knox acknowledge the support of NSF grant 0709498. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix package (Gorski et al. 2005). We acknowledge the use of the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science. We also acknowledge usage of the FFTW and TeXShop software packages.