Searching for Signatures of Cosmic String Wakes in 21cm Redshift Surveys using Minkowski Functionals

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Minkowski Functionals can effectively detect cosmic string signatures in 21cm surveys, potentially improving current detection limits by a factor of three.

Contribution

The study applies Minkowski Functionals to 21cm maps to identify cosmic string signatures and assesses their statistical significance, advancing detection methods for cosmic strings.

Findings

Detects cosmic strings with Gμ > 5×10^{-8}

Improves current detection limits by a factor of three

Validates Minkowski Functionals as a powerful analysis tool

Abstract

Minkowski Functionals are a powerful tool for analyzing large scale structure, in particular if the distribution of matter is highly non-Gaussian, as it is in models in which cosmic strings contribute to structure formation. Here we apply Minkowski functionals to 21cm maps which arise if structure is seeded by a scaling distribution of cosmic strings embeddded in background fluctuations, and then test for the statistical significance of the cosmic string signals using the Fisher combined probability test. We find that this method allows for detection of cosmic strings with $G \mu > 5 \times 10^{-8}$, which would be improvement over current limits by a factor of about 3.