Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

The Impact of Inhomogeneous Reionization on Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv astro-ph/9805012 v2 pith:HYWKTJGD submitted 1998-05-04 astro-ph

The Impact of Inhomogeneous Reionization on Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy

classification astro-ph
keywords inhomogeneousreionizationanisotropybackgroundcosmiceffectfindionized
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Hydrogen atoms in the Universe that initially formed at redshift z = 1100 were reionized at 5 < z < 60. It is likely that this transition proceeded through a mixed phase of partial ionization. We develop an analytic approach to calculating the effect on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) of Thomson scattering off this inhomogeneous distribution of free electrons. We study two models of the reionization process, one of which associates ionized patches with overdense regions of the smoothed density field. We find the generated anisotropy to have a power spectrum which peaks at angular scales corresponding to the extent of the ionized regions, and has a width that reflects the correlations between them. There is considerable uncertainty in the amplitude, which depends on how efficiently collapsed objects can reionize the surrounding medium. We calculate the effect of neglecting inhomogeneous reionization in the determination of cosmological parameters from high resolution CMB maps and find that it may be a significant source of systematic error.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Interlopers as Signal in Line Intensity Mapping

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Jointly modeling LIM interlopers as projected multi-redshift tracers often beats cleaning for Ω_m h² and BAO distances, yielding a transverse BAO ladder over 0.7≲z≲5.8 in SPHEREx/FYST forecasts.

  2. SPT-3G D1: A Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Power

    astro-ph.CO 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    SPT-3G's 2019–2020 spectra at ell=1700–11000 give D_tSZ=4.91±0.37 μK^2 and D_kSZ=1.75±0.86 μK^2 at ell=3000 (free-CIB model) and a 95% limit Δz_re<3.8 on the reionization duration.

  3. Compressed Gaussian likelihood for the Planck low-$\ell$ data

    astro-ph.CO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A compressed Gaussian likelihood for Planck low-ℓ data is built from SRoll2 via offset log-normal functions for Fisher compatibility and validated against the original via MCMC.

  4. Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters

    astro-ph.CO 2018-07 accept novelty 5.0

    Final Planck CMB data confirms the flat 6-parameter ΛCDM model with Ω_c h² = 0.120 ± 0.001, Ω_b h² = 0.0224 ± 0.0001, n_s = 0.965 ± 0.004, τ = 0.054 ± 0.007, H_0 = 67.4 ± 0.5 km/s/Mpc, and no strong evidence for extensions.

  5. What it takes to solve the Hubble tension through Modifications of Cosmological Recombination II: in light of ACT DR6 and DESI DR2

    astro-ph.CO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Perturbative modifications to the electron mass m_e(z) resolve the Hubble tension with Planck+ACT CMB data but cannot when DESI DR2 BAO data are added due to lowered Omega_m.