Tangled $\tau$: Planck CMB Constraints on Flash Reionization

Abstract

Recent cosmological tensions have renewed interest in the role of reionization in parameter inference, and flash reionization has been proposed as a transient high-redshift ionization episode that can increase the Thomson optical depth while remaining compatible with CMB polarization data. In this work, we present the first Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis of the flash reionization model fit to Planck cosmic microwave background temperature, polarization, and lensing data. We perform this analysis using Planck PR4 data in $\Lambda$CDM with flash reionization. We find that CMB data allow a wide range for the redshift of the flash, $z_{\rm flash}$, but with constraints that are tightly correlated with the peak ionization fraction $x_{\rm flash}$. We find constraints $x_{\rm flash}=0.24 ^{+0.13} _{-0.07}$ and $x_{\rm flash}= 0.15 ^{+0.07} _{ - 0.05}$ for the benchmark flash reionization scenarios with fixed $z_{\rm flash}=20$ and $25$ respectively. The standard $\Lambda$CDM parameters do not exhibit any significant shifts, and in particular, the total optical depth to reionization is not appreciably changed, with $\tau=0.061 \pm 0.007$ in flash reionization as compared to $\tau=0.059\pm 0.006$ in the standard tanh parametrization. We repeat this analysis for Planck PR3 data in place of PR4, and find that the mild preference for a flash is replaced by 95% CL upper bounds, given by $x_{\rm flash}<0.28$ and $x_{\rm flash}<0.18$ for $z_{\rm flash}=20$ and $25$, respectively, from Planck PR3 data.