Reionization by active sources and its effects on the cosmic microwave background

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 24 August 1998
Abstract
We investigate the possible effects of reionization on the cosmic microwave background by active sources. We concentrate on the sources themselves as the origin of reionization, rather than early object formation, introducing an extra period of heating motivated by the active character of the perturbations. Using sensible parameters, this leads to four possibilities dependent on the time and duration of the energy input: delayed last scattering, double last scattering, shifted last scattering and total reionization. These possibilities are only very weakly constrained by the limits on spectral distortions from the COBE FIRAS measurements, hence we illustrate their effects on the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies and polarization for simple passive isocurvature models and simple coherent sources, observing the difference between passive and active models. Finally, we comment on the implications of this work for more realistic active sources, such as causal white noise and topological defect models.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: