Radiative transfer of 21-cm line through ionised cavities in an expanding universe

TL;DR

This paper performs detailed radiative transfer calculations to understand how ionised cavities in the early universe affect the 21-cm signal, revealing features missed by simpler models and emphasizing the importance of accurate physics in EoR studies.

Contribution

It introduces explicit radiative transfer calculations for ionised bubbles during reionisation, highlighting effects overlooked by optical depth parametrisation.

Findings

Spectral features depend on bubble size and HI turbulence.

Finite light speed causes apparent shape differences in expanding bubbles.

Proper physics modeling is crucial for accurate EoR 21-cm predictions.

Abstract

The optical depth parameterisation is typically used to study the 21-cm signals associated with the properties of the neutral hydrogen (HI) gas and the ionisation morphology during the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR), without solving the radiative transfer equation. To assess the uncertainties resulting from this simplification, we conduct explicit radiative transfer calculations using the cosmological 21-cm radiative transfer (C21LRT) code and examine the imprints of ionisation structures on the 21-cm spectrum. We consider a globally averaged reionisation history and implement fully ionised cavities (HII bubbles) of diameters $d$ ranging from 0.01 Mpc to 10 Mpc at epochs within the emission and the absorption regimes of the 21-cm global signal. The single-ray C21LRT calculations show that the shape of the imprinted spectral features are primarily determined by $d$ and the 21-cm line profile, which is parametrised by the turbulent velocity of the HI gas. It reveals the spectral features tied to the transition from ionised to neutral regions that calculations based on the optical depth parametrisation were unable to capture. We also present analytical approximations of the calculated spectral features of the HII bubbles. The multiple-ray calculations show that the apparent shape of a HII bubble (of $d=5$ Mpc at $z=8$), because of the finite speed of light, differs depending on whether the bubble's ionisation front is stationary or expanding. Our study shows the necessity of properly accounting for the effects of line-continuum interaction, line broadening and cosmological expansion to correctly predict the EoR 21-cm signals.