Related papers: The Lumina Project: CMB Optical Depth Fluctuations…
It is shown that, in addition to the Thomson scattering, the absorption due to the electron-electron, electron-ion and the electron -atom collisions in a partially ionized cosmic plasma would also contribute to the optical depth of the…
The epoch of hydrogen reionization is complete by $z=5$, but its progression at higher redshifts is uncertain. Measurements of Ly$\alpha$ forest opacity show large scatter at $z<6$, suggestive of spatial fluctuations in neutral fraction…
Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropies from Planck have estimated a lower value of the optical depth to reionization ($\tau$) compared to WMAP. A significant period in the reionization history would then fall…
On large angular scales, the polarization of the CMB contains information about the evolution of the average ionization during the epoch of reionization. Interpretation of the polarization spectrum usually requires the assumption of a fixed…
Cosmic Reionization imprints its signature on the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Advances in CMB telescopes have already placed a significant constraint on the history of reionization. As…
The first-year WMAP data release showed that the reionization optical depth to CMB photons is greater than previously thought. This follows from unexpectedly high values of the C^TE_l spectrum, for l up to ~30, presumably allowing a…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies constrain isocurvature fluctuations between photons and non-relativistic particles to be sub-dominant to adiabatic fluctuations. Perturbations in the relative number densities…
We show that the statistical error, $\sigma_{\tau}$, in estimating the optical depth, $\tau$, due to microlensing is substantially higher than the naive Poisson estimate: $\sigma_{\tau} = \sqrt{\eta / N} \tau$, where $N$ is the number of…
We present a computationally efficient and fast semi-numerical technique for simulating the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) absorption optical depth in presence of neutral hydrogen "islands" left over from reionization at redshifts $5 \lesssim…
The standard cosmological model, with its six independent parameters, successfully describes our observable Universe. One of these parameters, the optical depth to reionization $\tau_\mathrm{reio}$, represents the scatterings that Cosmic…
Line-of-sight distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), including gravitational lensing, cosmic birefringence, and patchy screening, encode crucial cosmological information. While quadratic estimators (QE) have been excellent…
We describe a tomographic dissection of the Planck CMB lensing data, cross-correlating this map with galaxies in different ranges of photometric redshift. We use the nearly all-sky 2MPZ and WISExSCOS catalogues for z<0.35, extending to…
Recent baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) distance measurements, when combined with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations in the $\Lambda$CDM framework, lead to a preference for negative neutrino masses. We investigate whether this…
In a universe reionized in patches, the Doppler effect from Thomson scattering off free electrons generates secondary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. For a simple model with small patches and late reionization, we…
We perform an analysis of the cosmic reionization in the standard cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm and in alternative dark matter scenarios. Building upon the work of Corasaniti et al. (2017), we predict the reionization history for CDM, for…
The cross-correlation of cosmic voids with the lensing convergence ($\kappa$) map of the CMB fluctuations offers a powerful tool to refine our understanding of the dark sector in the consensus cosmological model. Our principal aim is to…
The average rate of emission of ionizing radiation per unit volume (or emissivity) in the universe can be calculated as the ratio of the intensity of the ionizing background to the mean free path of ionizing photons. The intensity of the…
The simple assumption of an instantaneous reionization of the Universe may bias estimates of cosmological parameters. In this paper a model-independent principal component method for the reionization history is applied to give constraints…
Based on the work by Mitra, Choudhury & Ferrara (2010), we obtain model-independent constraints on reionization from cosmic microwave background (CMB) and QSO absorption line data by decomposing the function N_{ion}(z) (the number of…
The measurement and characterization of the lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is key goal of the current and next generation of CMB experiments. We perform a case study of a three-channel balloon-borne CMB experiment…