{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reconstructing-patchy-reionization-from-the","title":"Reconstructing Patchy Reionization from the Cosmic Microwave Background","arxiv_id":"0812.1566","date":"2008-12-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Cora Dvorkin","Kendrick M. Smith"],"abstract":"We introduce a new statistical technique for extracting the inhomogeneous reionization signal from future high-sensitivity measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization fields. If reionization is inhomogeneous, then the optical depth to recombination will be a function tau(n) of position on the sky. Anisotropies in tau(n) alter the statistics of the observed CMB via several physical mechanisms: screening of the surface of last scattering, generation of new polarization via Thomson scattering from reionization bubbles, and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. We construct a quadratic estimator for the modes of the tau field. This estimator separates the patchy reionization signal from the CMB in the form of a noisy map, which can be cross-correlated with other probes of reionization or used as a standalone probe. A future satellite experiment with sufficient sensitivity and resolution to measure the lensed B-mode on most of the sky can constrain key parameters of patchy reionization, such as the duration of the patchy epoch or the mean bubble radius, at the ~10% level.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1566v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/0812.1566v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reconstructing-patchy-reionization-from-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/abaleato/curved_sky_B_template","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}