The Lumina simulation shows that explicit light-cone integrations produce a CMB optical depth 7% higher than volume-weighted ionization histories, with the excess accumulating near redshift 8 and mass-weighted estimates capturing most of the difference.
B-mode CMB Polarization from Patchy Screening during Reionization
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abstract
B-modes in CMB polarization from patchy reionization arise from two effects: generation of polarization from scattering of quadrupole moments by reionization bubbles, and fluctuations in the screening of E-modes from recombination. The scattering contribution has been studied previously, but the screening contribution has not yet been calculated. We show that on scales smaller than the acoustic scale (l>300), the B-mode power from screening is larger than the B-mode power from scattering. The ratio approaches a constant ~2.5 below the damping scale (l>2000). On degree scales relevant for gravitational waves (l<100), screening B-modes have a white noise tail and are subdominant to the scattering effect. These results are robust to uncertainties in the modeling of patchy reionization.
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astro-ph.CO 1years
2026 1verdicts
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The Lumina Project: CMB Optical Depth Fluctuations from Patchy Reionization
The Lumina simulation shows that explicit light-cone integrations produce a CMB optical depth 7% higher than volume-weighted ionization histories, with the excess accumulating near redshift 8 and mass-weighted estimates capturing most of the difference.