Imprint of Reionization on the Cosmic Microwave Background Bispectrum

Abstract

We study contributions to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum from non-Gaussianity induced by secondary anisotropies during reionization. Large-scale structure in the reionized epoch both gravitationally lenses CMB photons and produces Doppler shifts in their temperature from scattering off electrons in infall. The resulting correlation is potentially observable through the CMB bispectrum. The second-order Ostriker-Vishniac effect also couples to a variety of linear secondary effects to produce a bispectrum. For the currently favored flat cosmological model with a low matter content and small optical depth in the reionized epoch τ 0.3, however, these bispectrum contributions are well below the detection threshold of MAP and at or below that of Planck, given their cosmic and noise variance limitations. At the upper end of this range, they can serve as an extra source of noise for measurements with Planck of either primordial nongaussianity or that induced by the correlation of gravitational lensing with the integrated Sachs-Wolfe and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects. We include a discussion of the general properties of the CMB bispectrum, its configuration dependence for the various effects, and its computation in the Limber approximation and beyond.