Approximate analytic spectra of reionized CMB anisotropies and polarization generated by relic gravitational waves

Abstract

We present an approximate, analytical calculation of the reionized spectra ${C}_{l}^{XX}$ of cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropies and polarizations generated by relic gravitational waves (RGWs). Three simple models of reionization are explored, whose visibility functions are fitted by Gaussian types of functions as approximations. We have derived the analytical polarization ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{l}$ and temperature anisotropies ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{l}$, which both consist of two terms proportional to RGWs at the decoupling and at the reionization as well. The explicit dependence of ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{l}$ and ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{l}$ upon the reionization time ${\ensuremath{\eta}}_{r}$, the duration $\ensuremath{\Delta}{\ensuremath{\eta}}_{r}$, and the optical depth ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{r}$ is demonstrated. Moreover, ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{l}$ and ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{l}$ contain ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{r}$ in different coefficients, and the polarization spectra ${C}_{l}^{EE}$ and ${C}_{l}^{BB}$ are more sensitive probes of reionization than ${C}_{l}^{TT}$. These results facilitate examination of the reionization effects, in particular, the degeneracies of ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{r}$ with the normalization amplitude and with the initial spectral index of RGWs. It is also found that reionization causes a ${\ensuremath{\kappa}}_{r}$-dependent shift $\ensuremath{\Delta}l\ensuremath{\sim}20$ of the zero multipole ${l}_{0}$ of ${C}_{l}^{TE}$, an effect that should be included in order to detect the traces of RGWs. Compared with numerical results, the analytical ${C}_{l}^{XX}$ are approximate and have the limitation. For the primary peaks in the range $l\ensuremath{\simeq}(30,600)$, the error is $\ensuremath{\le}3%$ in three different models. In the range $l<20$ for the reionization bumps, the error is $\ensuremath{\le}15%$ for ${C}_{l}^{EE}$ and ${C}_{l}^{BB}$ in the two extended reionization models, and ${C}_{l}^{TT}$ and ${C}_{l}^{TE}$ have much larger departures for $l<10$. The bumps in the sudden reionization model are too low.