Extended reionization in models beyond ΛCDM with Planck 2018 data

We provide an update on the constraints on extended reionization histories with the Planck 2018 cosmic microwave background anisotropy data. The Planck 2018 data on large angular scales improve the measurement of the $E$-mode polarization reionization bump at low multipoles providing the possibility to improve our previous results. Using a minor modification to the original Poly-reion model for the reionization history, we find that the Planck 2018 data significantly improve all our previous results: we find as optical depth of $\tau=0.0572_{-0.0075}^{+0.0064}$ at 68% CL, that early onsets of reionization are strongly disfavoured, i.e. redshift when the reionization begins, $z_{xe=0}=18.18_{-10.89}^{+1.61}$ at 68% CL,and that reionization duration (defined between 10% and 99% reionization) is significantly reduced, i.e. $\Delta_z^{Reion}=4.59_{-2.45}^{+1.67}$ at 68% CL. We explore possible correlations between reionization histories and cosmological parameters, including important extensions beyond $\Lambda$CDM. We find that the degeneracy between reionization and scalar spectral index,neutrino mass sum, spatial curvature, dark matter annihilation and other non-standard models are significantly reduced.The reduction of the error bars and the degeneracies, together with the shift towards lower values of the optical depth that we observe in the Poly-reion model are mainly driven by the new low-$\ell$ polarization likelihood of Planck 2018 baseline based on the HFI data. This is confirmed also by the results derived without this likelihood and the ones with different alternatives to the baseline that are presented for a subset of models.