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The 21-cm forest can be used to probe both dark matter and the first galaxies

The 21-cm absorption lines from neutral hydrogen at cosmic dawn are proposed as a probe to simultaneously study dark matter particle mass and cosmic heating history. By applying a statistical approach to simulated data this probe is shown to distinguish the effects of dark matter from those of cosmic heating.

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Fig. 1: The modelled effect of the heating rate and WDM on the 1D power spectrum of the 21-cm forest.

References

  1. Carilli, C. L., Gnedin, N. Y. & Owen, F. H I 21 centimeter absorption beyond the epoch of reionization. Astrophys. J. 577, 22–30 (2002). This paper proposed that the 21-cm forest can be detected against luminous high-redshift radio-loud quasars.

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  5. Thyagarajan, N. Statistical detection of IGM structures during cosmic reionization using absorption of the redshifted 21 cm line by H I against compact background radio sources. Astrophys. J. 899, 16 (2020). This paper presents a 1D power spectrum analysis of the 21-cm forest, and demonstrates the sensitivity of the statistical technique.

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This is a summary of: Shao, Y. et al. The 21-cm forest as a simultaneous probe of dark matter and cosmic heating history. Nat. Astron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02024-7 (2023).

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The 21-cm forest can be used to probe both dark matter and the first galaxies. Nat Astron 7, 1019–1020 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02025-6

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