The 21-cm forest as a simultaneous probe of dark matter and cosmic heating history

Abstract

The absorption features in spectra of high-redshift background radio sources, caused by hyperfine structure lines of hydrogen atoms in the intervening structures, are known collectively as the 21-cm forest. They provide a unique probe of small-scale structures during the epoch of reionization, and can be used to constrain the properties of the dark matter (DM) thought to govern small-scale structure formation. However, the signals are easily suppressed by heating processes that are degenerate with a warm DM model. Here we propose a probe of both the DM particle mass and the heating history of the Universe, using the one-dimensional power spectrum of the 21-cm forest. The one-dimensional power spectrum measurement not only breaks the DM model degeneracy but also increases the sensitivity, making the probe actually feasible. Making 21-cm forest observations with the upcoming Square Kilometre Array has the potential to simultaneously determine both the DM particle mass and the heating level in the early Universe, shedding light on the nature of DM and the first galaxies.

53 pages, 6 figures, 2 extended data figures, 9 supplementary figures. Published in Nature Astronomy

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Prospects for Observing High-redshift Radio-loud Quasars in the SKA Era: Paving the Way for 21-cm Forest Observations
• Deep learning-driven likelihood-free parameter inference for 21-cm forest observations
• Analyzing the 21cm forest with Wavelet Scattering Transform: Insight into non-Gaussian features of the 21cm forest
• Prospects of a statistical detection of the 21-cm forest and its potential to constrain the thermal state of the neutral IGM during reionization
• Probing self-interacting ultrahigh-energy neutrinos with the cosmic 21-cm signal
• Prospects for measuring neutrino mass with 21-cm forest
• Prospects for probing dark matter particles and primordial black holes with the Hongmeng mission using the 21 cm global spectrum at cosmic dawn
• Inelastic Scattering of Dark Matter with Heavy Cosmic Rays
• Forecast measurement of the 21 cm global spectrum from Lunar orbit with the Vari-Zeroth-Order Polynomial (VZOP) method
• Theoretical Radio Signals from Radio-Band Gravitational Waves Converted from the Neutron Star Magnetic Field
• Analytical modeling of the one-dimensional power spectrum of 21-cm forest based on a halo model method
• Configuration Requirements for 21-cm Forest Background Quasar Searches with the Moon-based Interferometer
• Probing power spectrum enhancement at small scales with the SKA
• High Sensitivity Methodologies to Detect Radio Band Gravitational Waves
• Conditional variational autoencoders for cosmological model discrimination and anomaly detection in cosmic microwave background power spectra
• Efficient neutral-IGM inference from noisy 21-cm forest spectra with latent-space U-Net encoding and XGBoost