WHAT NEXT-GENERATION 21 cm POWER SPECTRUM MEASUREMENTS CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION

By Jonathan C. Pober, Adrian Liu, J. Dillon, J. Aguirre, Judd D. Bowman, R. Bradley, C. Carilli, D. DeBoer, Jacqueline N. Hewitt, Daniel C. Jacobs and 5 more. 2013

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A number of experiments are currently working toward a measurement of the 21 cm signal from the epoch of reionization (EoR). Whether or not these experiments deliver a detection of cosmological emission, their limited sensitivity will prevent them from providing detailed information about the astrophysics of reionization. In this work, we consider what types of measurements will be enabled by the next generation of larger 21 cm EoR telescopes. To calculate the type of constraints that will be possible with such arrays, we use simple models for the instrument, foreground emission, and the reionization history. We focus primarily on an instrument modeled after the ∼0.1 km2 collecting area Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array concept design and parameterize the uncertainties with regard to foreground emission by considering different limits to the recently described “wedge” footprint in k space. Uncertainties in the reionization history are accounted for using a series of simulations that vary the ionizing efficiency and minimum virial temperature of the galaxies responsible for reionization, as well as the mean free path of ionizing photons through the intergalactic medium. Given various combinations of models, we consider the significance of the possible power spectrum detections, the ability to trace the power spectrum evolution versus redshift, the detectability of salient power spectrum features, and the achievable level of quantitative constraints on astrophysical parameters. Ultimately, we find that 0.1 km2 of collecting area is enough to ensure a very high significance (≳ 30σ) detection of the reionization power spectrum in even the most pessimistic scenarios. This sensitivity should allow for meaningful constraints on the reionization history and astrophysical parameters, especially if foreground subtraction techniques can be improved and successfully implemented.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09fe0b399218acf4be01f4cb4f4243bf1c95fd23

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Citations in the corpus

21CMMC: an MCMC analysis tool enabling astrophysical parameter studies of the cosmic 21 cm signal (2015, methodology): “While the total observing area for HERA is an order of magnitude lower than the SKA, its design is optimized specifically for PS measurements allowing for comparable sensitivity (Pober et al. 2014)9.”
New Limits on 21cm EoR From PAPER-32 Consistent with an X-Ray Heated IGM at z=7.7 (2013, unknown): “Plans are also proceeding for a next-generation instrument, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)22, which, with ∼ 0.1km2 of collecting area, will have the capability to characterize the power spectrum of reionization in detail (Pober et al. 2014).”
COSMIC REIONIZATION AND EARLY STAR-FORMING GALAXIES: A JOINT ANALYSIS OF NEW CONSTRAINTS FROM PLANCK AND THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE (2015, background): “Our results offer extra hope for efforts to make redshifted 21-cm measurements of neutral hydrogen in the IGM, as the experimental foregrounds are weakest at low redshifts (e.g., van Haarlem et al. 2013; Bowman et al. 2013; Pober et al. 2014).”
Charting the parameter space of the global 21-cm signal (2016, methodology): “…et al. 2016), the Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER, Ali et al. 2015), the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA, Pober et al. 2014; DeBoer et al. 2016), and the Square Kilometer Array 1 Bernardi et al. (2016) used a Bayesian method with a simplified Gaussian…”
Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) (2016, methodology): “…for HERA—an instrument designed to ensure that foregrounds remain bounded within the wedge while delivering the sensitivity for high-significance detections of the 21 cm reionization power spectrum with established foreground filtering techniques (Pober et al. 2014b; Greig & Mesinger 2015).”
Improved upper limits on the 21 cm signal power spectrum of neutral hydrogen at z ≈ 9.1 from LOFAR (2020, methodology): “We adopt a foreground removal strategy which, if done correctly, has the advantage of considerably increasing our sensitivity to larger co-moving scales (smaller kmodes) (Pober et al. 2014).”
PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS ON REIONIZATION: THE 21 cm POWER SPECTRUM AT z = 8.4 (2015, methodology): “Sensitivity forecasts for a 331-element HERA array and SKA-Low show that they can deliver detections of the 21cm reionization signal at a significance of 39σ and 21σ, respectively, using the same the conservative foreground avoidance strategy employed in this paper (Pober et al. 2014).”
Inferring the astrophysics of reionization and cosmic dawn from galaxy luminosity functions and the 21-cm signal (2018, methodology): “…parameter inference has been made using on-the-fly sampling of 3D simulations (Greig & Mesinger 2015, 2017b; Greig & Mesinger 2018), as well as interpolating simulations over a parameter grid (Mesinger et al. 2014, 2016; Pober et al. 2014; Liu et al. 2016; Fialkov et al. 2017; Hassan et al. 2017).”
Calibration requirements for detecting the 21 cm epoch of reionization power spectrum and implications for the SKA (2016, background): “…(PAPER; Parsons et al. 2010)1, the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR; Yatawatta et al. 2013; van Haarlem et al. 2013)2, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA; Lonsdale et al. 2009; Tingay et al. 2013; Bowman et al. 2013)3, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA; Pober et al. 2014)4, and ?”