Srinivasan Raghunathan (NCSA, U. Illinois): "Prospects for Kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Measurements from Current and Future Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments"

The Doppler boosting of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons due to scattering off free electrons produces the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect. It offers a unique way to probe the epoch of reionisation. However, the kSZ signal is sub-dominant to other astrophysical signals, in particular the emission from dusty star forming galaxies that form the diffuse component of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) at millimetre wavelengths. In this talk, I will present results from an ongoing work that combines data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and the Herschel-SPIRE experiments to detect the kSZ power spectrum in a manner which is robust against the contamination from CIB. I will also discuss the future prospects for kSZ measurements and the constraints on the physics of reionisation expected from SPT and other upcoming CMB surveys. The forecasts indicate that the future kSZ measurements can constrain the optical depth to reionisation with sigma(tau) = 0.005, which is highly complementary to primary CMB-based constraints from Planck, and the duration of reionisation with sigma(Delta z_re) = 0.42, which is currently unconstrained by Planck.