The Dark Ages of the Universe and Hydrogen Reionization

Abstract

One of the milestones in the cosmic history is the formation of the first luminous objects and Hydrogen reionization. The standard theory of cosmic structure formation predicts that the first generation of stars were born about a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The dark Universe was then lit up once again, and eventually filled with ultraviolet photons emitted from stars, galaxies, and quasars. The exact epoch of the cosmic reionization and the details of the process, even the dominant sources, are not known except the fact that the universe was reionized early on. Signatures of reionization are expected to be imprinted in the cosmic microwave background radiation, especially in its large scale polarization. Future CMB experiments, together with other probes such as 21 cm surveys, will provide rich information on the process of reionization. We review recent studies on reionization. The implications from available observations in a wide range of wavelengths are discussed. Results from state-of-the-art computer simulations are presented. Finally, we discuss prospects for exploring the first few hundred million years of the cosmic history.

Invited Review; To appear in Special Section "CMB Cosmology" of Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (PTEP)

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• First study of reionization in tilted flat and untilted non-flat dynamical dark energy inflation models
• Cornering Extended Starobinsky Inflation with CMB and SKA
• A Multi-messenger view of Cosmic Dawn: Conquering the Final Frontier
• Signal in the Hyperfine Structure Line of the Ground State of Atomic Hydrogen from the Dark Ages as a Cosmological Test
• Global signal in the redshifted hydrogen 21-cm line from the Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn: Dependence on the nature of dark matter and modeling of first light
• 21 cm Signal from the Thermal Evolution of Lyman-$\alpha$ during Cosmic Dawn
• Impact of reionization history on constraining primordial gravitational waves in future all-sky cosmic microwave background experiments
• Radiative transfer of 21-cm line through ionised cavities in an expanding universe
• Thermal Evolution of the IGM due to Lyman-α photons during the Cosmic Dawn
• Sensitivity of the redshifted 21 cm signal from the Dark Ages to parameters of primordial magnetic fields
• Probing the Inflaton Potential with SKA