On the Prospects of Measuring the Cosmic Dawn 21-cm Power Spectrum using the Upgraded Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00515


A recent observation by the EDGES collaboration (Bowman et al. 2018) shows a strong absorption signal in the global 21-cm spectrum from around a redshift of $z = 17$. This absorption is stronger than the maximum prediction by existing models and indicates that the spatial fluctuations of the HI 21-cm brightness temperature at Cosmic Dawn could be an order of magnitude larger than previously expected (Barkana 2018; Fialkov et al. 2018). In this letter, we investigate the prospects of detecting the HI 21-cm power spectrum from Cosmic Dawn using uGMRT. We find that a $10\sigma$ detection of the enhanced HI 21-cm signal power spectrum is possible within $60, 120$ and $350$ Hours of observation for an optimistic, moderate and pessimistic scenario respectively, using the Band-1 of uGMRT. This could be an useful probe of the interaction between the baryon and dark matter particles in the early universe.

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S. Chatterjee and S. Bharadwaj
Tue, 3 Apr 18
27/57

Comments: Submitted to MNRAS