Signatures of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations on 21cm Emission Background

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that baryon acoustic oscillations leave detectable signatures on the 21cm emission background from reionization, which future radio telescopes can observe to improve cosmological parameter constraints.

Contribution

The study provides an analytical demonstration of BAO signatures on 21cm fluctuations and discusses their detectability with upcoming low-frequency radio telescopes.

Findings

BAO signatures are imprinted on 21cm emission fluctuations.

Future telescopes like LOFAR and MWA can detect these signatures within about a year.

Combining BAO measurements across different redshifts can constrain cosmological parameters.

Abstract

The baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) prior to recombination should be imprinted onto the 21cm emission background from the epoch of reionization through the underlying density perturbations. Using an analytical approach for both matter power spectrum (CDM+baryons) and reionization process, we demonstrate the BAO induced signatures on the power spectrum of 21cm emission fluctuations. Future low-frequency radio telescopes such as LOFAR and MWA should be able to detect these weak BAO wiggles with an integration time of $\sim1$ year. A combination of the BAO measurements at different redshifts $z\approx1000$ (CMB), $z\approx10$ (epoch of reionization) and $z\approx0$ (clustering of galaxies) may allow one to set more robust constraints on the determinations of cosmological parameters including dark energy and its equation of state.