21 cm signal from cosmic dawn: Imprints of spin temperature fluctuations and peculiar velocities

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism to simulate 21 cm brightness temperature fluctuations during cosmic dawn, accounting for spin temperature variations and peculiar velocities, revealing key features in the power spectrum related to heating and ionization processes.

Contribution

It introduces a new simulation approach combining dark matter and radiative transfer to model 21 cm signals, including spin temperature fluctuations and velocity effects during cosmic dawn.

Findings

Power spectrum peaks when ~10% of gas is heated above CMB temperature.

A bump in the power spectrum indicates typical sizes of heated regions.

Peculiar velocities have negligible impact at large scales during most of reionization.

Abstract

The 21 cm brightness temperature $\delta T_{\rm b}$ fluctuations from reionization promise to provide information on the physical processes during that epoch. We present a formalism for generating the $\delta T_{\rm b}$ distribution using dark matter simulations and an one-dimensional radiative transfer code. Our analysis is able to account for the spin temperature $T_{\rm S}$ fluctuations arising from inhomogeneous X-ray heating and Ly$\alpha$ coupling during cosmic dawn. The $\delta T_{\rm b}$ power spectrum amplitude at large scales ($k \sim 0.1$ Mpc$^{-1}$) is maximum when $\sim 10\%$ of the gas (by volume) is heated above the CMB temperature. The power spectrum shows a "bump"-like feature during cosmic dawn and its location measures the typical sizes of heated regions. We find that the effect of peculiar velocities on the power spectrum is negligible at large scales for most part of the reionization history. During early stages (when the volume averaged ionization fraction $\lesssim 0.2$) this is because the signal is dominated by fluctuations in $T_{\rm S}$. For reionization models that are solely driven by stars within high mass ($\gtrsim 10^9\, \rm M_{\odot}$) haloes, the peculiar velocity effects are prominent only at smaller scales ($k \gtrsim 0.4$ Mpc$^{-1}$) where patchiness in the neutral hydrogen density dominates the signal. The conclusions are unaffected by changes in the amplitude or steepness in the X-ray spectra of the sources.