Astro 2020 Science White Paper: Fundamental Cosmology in the Dark Ages with 21-cm Line Fluctuations

Abstract

The Dark Ages are the period between the last scattering of the cosmic microwave background and the appearance of the first luminous sources, spanning approximately 1100 < z < 30. The only known way to measure fluctuations in this era is through the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen. Such observations have enormous potential for cosmology, because they span a large volume while the fluctuations remain linear even on small scales. Observations of 21-cm fluctuations during this era can therefore constrain fundamental aspects of our Universe, including inflation and any exotic physics of dark matter. While the observational challenges to these low-frequency 21-cm observations are enormous, especially from the terrestrial environment, they represent an important goal for cosmology.

10 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• How accurately can 21 cm tomography constrain cosmology?
• The 21cm angular-power spectrum from the dark ages
• Dark Cosmology: Investigating Dark Matter & Exotic Physics in the Dark Ages using the Redshifted 21-cm Global Spectrum

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe
• Redundant-Baseline Calibration of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array
• A unified framework for 21cm tomography sample generation and parameter inference with Progressively Growing GANs
• 1/f Noise Analysis for FAST HI Intensity Mapping Drift-Scan Experiment
• Dark ages, a window on the dark sector. Hunting for ultra-light axions
• Mapping the Universe in HD
• A Lunar Farside Low Radio Frequency Array for Dark Ages 21-cm Cosmology
• Reaching small scales with low frequency imaging: applications to the Dark Ages
• Perspectives on fundamental cosmology from Low Earth Orbit and the Moon
• Testing the growth of cosmic structures during the Dark Ages