English

Improving constraints on the reionization parameters using 21-cm bispectrum

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-05-04 v3 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Radio interferometric experiments aim to constrain the reionization model parameters by measuring the 21-cm signal statistics, primarily the power spectrum. However the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) 21-cm signal is highly non-Gaussian, and this non-Gaussianity encodes important information about this era. The bispectrum is the lowest order statistic able to capture this inherent non-Gaussianity. Here we are the first to demonstrate that bispectra for large and intermediate length scales and for all unique kk-triangle shapes provide tighter constraints on the EoR parameters compared to the power spectrum or the bispectra for a limited number of shapes of kk-triangles. We use the Bayesian inference technique to constrain EoR parameters. We have also developed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based emulator for the EoR 21-cm power spectrum and bispectrum which we use to remarkably speed up our parameter inference pipeline. Here we have considered the sample variance and the system noise uncertainties corresponding to 10001000 hrs of SKA-Low observations for estimating errors in the signal statistics. We find that using all unique kk-triangle bispectra improves the constraints on parameters by a factor of 242-4 (depending on the stage of reionization) over the constraints that are obtained using power spectrum alone.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.07279,
  title  = {Improving constraints on the reionization parameters using 21-cm bispectrum},
  author = {Himanshu Tiwari and Abinash Kumar Shaw and Suman Majumdar and Mohd Kamran and Madhurima Choudhury},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07279},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

27 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:09:49.899Z