Impact of the Epoch of Reionization sources on the 21-cm bispectrum

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different sources of ionizing radiation during the Epoch of Reionization influence the 21-cm bispectrum, demonstrating its potential to distinguish between various reionization scenarios and IGM morphologies.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive analysis of the 21-cm bispectrum across multiple reionization models, showing its effectiveness in differentiating IGM morphologies.

Findings

Significant differences in bispectrum magnitude and sign across reionization scenarios.

Large-scale bispectrum can distinguish inside-out, outside-in, and mixed morphologies.

Specific $k$-triangle shapes enhance the ability to differentiate scenarios.

Abstract

The morphology of the 21-cm signal emitted by the neutral hydrogen present in the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) depends both on the properties of the sources of ionizing radiation and on the underlying physical processes within the IGM. Variation in the morphology of the IGM 21-cm signal due to the different sources of the EoR is expected to have a significant impact on the 21-cm bispectrum, which is one of the crucial observable statistics that can evaluate the non-Gaussianity present in the signal and which can be estimated from radio interferometric observations of the EoR. Here we present the 21-cm bispectrum for different reionization scenarios assuming different simulated models for the sources of reionization. We also demonstrate how well the 21-cm bispectrum can distinguish between different IGM 21-cm signal morphologies, arising due to the differences in the reionization scenarios, which will help us shed light on the nature of the sources of ionizing photons. Our estimated large-scale bispectrum for all unique $k$-triangle shapes shows a significant difference in the magnitude and sign across different reionization scenarios. Additionally, our focused analysis of bispectrum for a few specific $k$-triangle shapes (e.g. squeezed-limit, linear, and shapes in the vicinity of the squeezed-limit) shows that the large scale 21-cm bispectrum can distinguish between reionization scenarios that show inside-out, outside-in and a combination of inside-out and outside-in morphologies. These results highlight the potential of using the 21-cm bispectrum for constraining different reionization scenarios.