Kavli Affiliate: Jacqueline N. Hewitt
| First 5 Authors: Kai-Feng Chen, Kai-Feng Chen, , ,
| Summary:
Observations of the redshifted 21-cm line during the Epoch of Reionization
will open a new window to probe the intergalactic medium during the formation
of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes. A particularly promising route
to an initial detection is to cross-correlate tomographic 21-cm maps with
spectroscopically confirmed Lyman-$alpha$ emitters (LAEs). High-redshift LAEs
preferentially reside in ionized bubbles that are strongly anticorrelated with
the surrounding neutral regions traced by 21-cm observations. In this work, we
study the prospect of detecting such a cross-correlation signal by stacking
21-cm image cubes around LAEs using a current-generation 21-cm instrument —
the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). Our forecast adopts a
realistic mapping pipeline to generate foreground-free 21-cm image cubes. The
statistical properties of these images, arising from the complex instrumental
response, are carefully accounted for. We further introduce a physically
motivated signal template calibrated on the THESAN radiation-hydrodynamic
simulations, which connects the cross-correlation amplitude to the global
neutral fraction. Our results show that a sample of ~50 spectroscopically
confirmed LAEs is sufficient to begin constraining the reionization history.
These results represent an important preparatory step toward joint analyses of
21-cm experiments with upcoming wide-area, high-redshift galaxy surveys from
Euclid and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
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