Discriminating Planck Reionisation Histories with the kSZ Effect

Abstract

The epoch of reionisation is a key phase in cosmic history, but its detailed evolution remains poorly constrained by current cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. We investigate whether the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel&#39;dovich (kSZ) effect can discriminate among reionisation histories consistent with current large-scale CMB constraints. Using histories derived from \textit{Planck} data, we compute the corresponding kSZ angular power spectra within an analytical framework. The allowed histories fall into two broad classes, &#39;late&#39; and &#39;early&#39; start, yielding distinct kSZ signatures, which remain clearly separable even when accounting for modelling uncertainties in both the reionisation scenario, $x_e(z)$, and the properties of early galaxies. Current kSZ measurements ($\sim$0-3 $μ$K$^2$) tend to favour `late&#39; reionisation models but are not yet sensitive enough to definitely distinguish between the scenarios - a measurement of the kSZ power spectrum at $\ell \sim 2000$ with $\sim$0.4 $μ$K$^2$ sensitivity, achievable in the coming years, will be sufficient to do so. This work demonstrates that CMB data alone can constrain the reionisation midpoint $z_\mathrm{re}$ with extremely narrow error bars ($7.94<z_\mathrm{re}<8.17$), even when effectively marginalising over modelling uncertainties.