COSMOLOGY

(8) On the Direct Detectability of the Cosmic Dark Ages: 21-cm Emission from Minihalos

In the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of structure formation, virialized minihalos (with T_vir < 10^4 K) form in abundance at high redshift (z > 6), during the cosmic "dark ages." The hydrogen in these minihalos, the first nonlinear baryonic structures to form in the universe, is mostly neutral and sufficiently hot and dense to emit strongly at the 21-cm line. In a recent paper (Iliev et al. 2002), we calculate the emission from individual minihalos and the radiation background contributed by their combined effect. Minihalos create a "21-cm forest" of emission lines. We predict that the angular fluctuations in this 21-cm background should be detectable with the planned LOFAR and SKA radio arrays, thus providing a direct probe of structure formation during the "dark ages." Such a detection will serve to confirm the basic CDM paradigm while constraining the background cosmology parameters, the shape of the power-spectrum of primordial density fluctuations, the onset and duration of the reionization epoch, and the conditions which led to the first stars and quasars. We present results here for the currently-favored, flat Lambda CDM model, for different tilts of the primordial power spectrum.

In our original calculation, we used a standard approximation known as the "linear bias" [e.g. Mo & White (1996)]. In a follow-up paper (Iliev et al. 2003), we improve upon that treatment by considering the effect of nonlinear clustering. To accomplish this, we develop a new analytical method for calculating the nonlinear Eulerian bias of halos, which should be useful for other applications as well. Predictions of this method are compared with the results of LambdaCDM N-body simulations, showing significantly better agreement than the standard linear bias approximation. When applied to the 21-cm background from minihalos, our formalism predicts fluctuations that differ from our original predictions by up to 30% at low frequencies and small scales. However, within the range of frequencies and angular scales at which the signal could be observable by LOFAR and SKA as currently planned, the differences are small and our original predictions prove robust. Our results indicate that while a smaller frequency bandwidth of observation leads to a higher signal that is more sensitive to nonlinear effects, this effect is counteracted by the lowered sensitivity of the radio arrays. We calculate the best frequency bandwidth for these observations to be Delta nu~2 MHz.

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