21cmfast: a fast, seminumerical simulation of the high‐redshift 21‐cm signal

By A. Mesinger, S. Furlanetto, Renyue Cen. 2010

600 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a powerful semi-numeric modeling tool, 21cmFAST, designed to efficiently simulate the cosmological 21-cm signal. Our code generates 3D realizations of evolved density, ionization, peculiar velocity, and spin temperature fields, which it then combines to compute the 21-cm brightness temperature. Although the physical processes are treated with approximate methods, we compare our results to a state-of-the-art large-scale hydrodynamic simulation, and find good agreement on scales pertinent to the upcoming observations (>~ 1 Mpc). The power spectra from 21cmFAST agree with those generated from the numerical simulation to within 10s of percent, down to the Nyquist frequency. We show results from a 1 Gpc simulation which tracks the cosmic 21-cm signal down from z=250, highlighting the various interesting epochs. Depending on the desired resolution, 21cmFAST can compute a redshift realization on a single processor in just a few minutes. Our code is fast, efficient, customizable and publicly available, making it a useful tool for 21-cm parameter studies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ad08a8a5f1a847eae0a54b2df95e10b5ad6e357

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Improved upper limits on the 21 cm signal power spectrum of neutral hydrogen at z ≈ 9.1 from LOFAR (2020, background): “Much more research is still needed, however, to control the many complex aspects in the signal processing chain (Liu & Shaw 2019) in order to reach the expected 21-cm signal strengths which lie two to three orders of magnitude below these limits (e.g. Mesinger et al. 2011).”
The First Billion Years project: the escape fraction of ionizing photons in the epoch of reionization (2015, background): “…et al. 2012; Robertson et al. 2013), semi-analytic modelling of reionisation (e.g. Choudhury et al. 2009; Pritchard et al. 2010; Santos et al. 2010; Mesinger et al. 2011; Raskutti et al. 2012; Mitra et al. 2013; Shull et al. 2012) and numerical simulations of reionisation (e.g. Iliev et al.…”
Enhanced Global Signal of Neutral Hydrogen Due to Excess Radiation at Cosmic Dawn (2018, methodology): “We run 21cmFAST 1 to create templates for the ionizing fraction xi, xα, xc and xα/Tα (Mesinger et al. 2011).”
Radiation Backgrounds at Cosmic Dawn: X-Rays from Compact Binaries (2016, methodology): “…when X-rays raise the gas temperature above that of the CMB (e.g., Madau et al. 1997; Venkatesan et al. 2001; Oh 2001; Madau et al. 2004; Ricotti & Ostriker 2004; Furlanetto 2006; Pritchard & Furlanetto 2007; Ciardi et al. 2010; Mirabel et al. 2011; Mesinger et al. 2011, 2013; Tanaka et al. 2016).”
Can the intergalactic medium cause a rapid drop in Lyα emission at z > 6? (2014, methodology): “The 5 http://homepage.sns.it/mesinger/Sim semi-numerical approach combines excursion set and perturbation formalisms to generate various cosmic fields, and has been extensively tested against numerical simulations (Mesinger & Furlanetto 2007; Mesinger et al. 2011; Zahn et al. 2011).”
Charting the parameter space of the global 21-cm signal (2016, methodology): “In order to explore the parameter space of the early universe and produce a library of possible global 21- cm signals in the redshift range z = 6 − 40 we use a semi-numerical approach (Mesinger et al. 2011; Visbal et al. 2012; Fialkov et al. 2014).”
Inhomogeneous recombinations during cosmic reionization (2014, methodology): “At the cell size, Rcell, the partial ionizations from sub-grid sources are evaluated, and the cell’s ionized fraction is set to ξfcoll(x, z, Rcell,Mmin)/(1 + nrec) (Mesinger et al. 2011).”