Implications of the z > 5 Lyman-α forest for the 21-cm power spectrum from the epoch of reionization

ABSTRACT Our understanding of the intergalactic medium at redshifts z = 5–6 has improved considerably in the last few years due to the discovery of quasars with z > 6 that enable Lyman-α forest studies at these redshifts. A realization from this has been that hydrogen reionization could end much...

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Veröffentlicht in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2021-11, Vol.507 (4), p.4684-4696
Hauptverfasser: Raste, Janakee, Kulkarni, Girish, Keating, Laura C, Haehnelt, Martin G, Chardin, Jonathan, Aubert, Dominique
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:ABSTRACT Our understanding of the intergalactic medium at redshifts z = 5–6 has improved considerably in the last few years due to the discovery of quasars with z > 6 that enable Lyman-α forest studies at these redshifts. A realization from this has been that hydrogen reionization could end much later than previously thought, so that large ‘islands’ of cold, neutral hydrogen could exist in the IGM at redshifts z = 5–6. By using radiative transfer simulations of the IGM, we consider the implications of the presence of these neutral hydrogen islands for the 21-cm power spectrum signal and its potential detection by experiments such as hera, ska, lofar, and mwa. In contrast with previous models of the 21-cm signal, we find that thanks to the late end of reionization the 21-cm power in our simulation continues to be as high as $\Delta ^2_{21}=10~\mathrm{mK}^2$ at k ∼ 0.1 h cMpc−1 at z = 5–6. This value of the power spectrum is several orders of magnitude higher than that in conventional models considered in the literature for these redshifts. Such high values of the 21-cm power spectrum should be detectable by hera and ska1-low in ∼1000 h, assuming optimistic foreground subtraction. This redshift range is also attractive due to relatively low sky temperature and potentially greater abundance of multiwavelength data.
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966
DOI:10.1093/mnras/stab2424