Probing the epoch of pre-reionization by cross-correlating cosmic microwave and infrared background anisotropies

Abstract

The epoch of first star formation and the state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at that time are not directly observable with current telescopes. The radiation from those early sources is now part of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) and, as these sources ionize the gas around them, the IGM plasma would produce faint temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) via the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (TSZ) effect. While these TSZ anisotropies are too faint to be detected, we show that the cross-correlation of maps of source-subtracted CIB fluctuations from Euclid, with suitably constructed microwave maps at different frequencies, can probe the physical state of the gas during reionization and test/constrain models of the early CIB sources. We identify the frequency-combined, CMB-subtracted microwave maps from space- and ground-based instruments to show that they can be cross-correlated with the forthcoming all-sky Euclid CIB maps to detect the cross-power at scales 5′-60′ with signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns) of up to S/N 4-8 depending on the contribution to the Thomson optical depth during those pre-reionization epochs (Δτ ≃ 0.05) and the temperature of the IGM (up to 104 K). Such a measurement would offer a new window to explore the emergence and physical properties of these first light sources.