Multipole expansion for 21cm Intensity Mapping power spectrum: forecasted cosmological parameters estimation for the SKA Observatory

TL;DR

This paper forecasts the potential of 21cm intensity mapping with SKA to constrain cosmological parameters, demonstrating its competitiveness and synergy with CMB data for testing the $ ext{Lambda}$CDM model.

Contribution

It introduces a method to forecast cosmological parameter constraints from 21cm intensity mapping, extending analysis to non-linear scales and combining with Planck data.

Findings

21cm multipoles alone can constrain parameters effectively.

Combining 21cm data with Planck reduces errors significantly.

Errors on $ ext{Omega}_c^2$ and $H_0$ are reduced by nearly a factor of four.

Abstract

The measurement of the large scale distribution of neutral hydrogen in the late Universe, obtained with radio telescopes through the hydrogen 21cm line emission, has the potential to become a key cosmological probe in the upcoming years. We explore the constraining power of 21cm intensity mapping observations on the full set of cosmological parameters that describe the $\Lambda$CDM model. We assume a single-dish survey for the SKA Observatory and simulate the 21cm linear power spectrum monopole and quadrupole within six redshift bins in the range $z=0.25-3$. Forecasted constraints are computed numerically through Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. We extend the sampler \texttt{CosmoMC} by implementing the likelihood function for the 21cm power spectrum multipoles. We assess the constraining power of the mock data set alone and combined with Planck 2018 CMB observations. We include a discussion on the impact of extending measurements to non-linear scales in our analysis. We find that 21cm multipoles observations alone are enough to obtain constraints on the cosmological parameters comparable with other probes. Combining the 21cm data set with CMB observations results in significantly reduced errors on all the cosmological parameters. The strongest effect is on $\Omega_ch^2$ and $H_0$, for which the error is reduced by almost a factor four. The percentage errors we estimate are $\sigma_{\Omega_ch^2} = 0.25\%$ and $\sigma_{H_0} = 0.16\%$, to be compared with the Planck only results $\sigma_{\Omega_ch^2} = 0.99\%$ and $\sigma_{H_0} = 0.79\%$. We conclude that 21cm SKAO observations will provide a competitive cosmological probe, complementary to CMB and, thus, pivotal for gaining statistical significance on the cosmological parameters constraints, allowing a stress test for the current cosmological model.