English

A Halo Model Approach to the $\rm{21\, cm}$ and $\rm{Ly}\alpha$ Cross-correlation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-09-06 v2

Abstract

We present a halo-model-based approach to calculate the cross-correlation between 21cm\rm{21\,cm} HI intensity fluctuations and Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha emitters (LAE) during the epoch of reionization (EoR). Ionizing radiation around dark matter halos are modeled as bubbles with the size and growth determined based on the reionization photon production, among other physical parameters. The cross-correlation shows a clear negative-to-positive transition, associated with transition from ionized to neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium during EoR. The cross-correlation is subject to several foreground contaminants, including foreground radio point sources important for 21cm\rm{21\,cm} experiments and low-zz interloper emission lines, such as Hα\rm{H}\alpha, OIII, and OII, for Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha experiments. Our calculations show that by masking out high fluxes in the Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha measurement, the correlated foreground contamination on the 21cm\rm{21\,cm}-Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha cross-correlation can be dramatically reduced. We forecast the detectability of 21cm\rm{21\,cm}-Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha cross-correlation at different redshifts and adopt a Fisher matrix approach to estimate uncertainties on the key EoR parameters that have not been well constrained by other observations of reionization. This halo-model-based approach enables us to explore the EoR parameter space rapidly for different 21cm\rm{21\,cm} and Lyα\rm{Ly}\alpha experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.07005,
  title  = {A Halo Model Approach to the $\rm{21\, cm}$ and $\rm{Ly}\alpha$ Cross-correlation},
  author = {Chang Feng and Asantha Cooray and Brian Keating},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.07005},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

13 pages, 17 figures. Version accepted for publication in ApJ