19 research outputs found
Fast Large-Scale Reionization Simulations
We present an efficient method to generate large simulations of the Epoch of
Reionization (EoR) without the need for a full 3-dimensional radiative transfer
code. Large dark-matter-only simulations are post-processed to produce maps of
the redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen. Dark matter haloes are
embedded with sources of radiation whose properties are either based on
semi-analytical prescriptions or derived from hydrodynamical simulations. These
sources could either be stars or power-law sources with varying spectral
indices. Assuming spherical symmetry, ionized bubbles are created around these
sources, whose radial ionized fraction and temperature profiles are derived
from a catalogue of 1-D radiative transfer experiments. In case of overlap of
these spheres, photons are conserved by redistributing them around the
connected ionized regions corresponding to the spheres. The efficiency with
which these maps are created allows us to span the large parameter space
typically encountered in reionization simulations. We compare our results with
other, more accurate, 3-D radiative transfer simulations and find excellent
agreement for the redshifts and the spatial scales of interest to upcoming 21cm
experiments. We generate a contiguous observational cube spanning redshift 6 to
12 and use these simulations to study the differences in the reionization
histories between stars and quasars. Finally, the signal is convolved with the
LOFAR beam response and its effects are analyzed and quantified. Statistics
performed on this mock data set shed light on possible observational strategies
for LOFAR.Comment: 18 pages, 21 figures, submitted to MNRAS For high-resolution images
follow "http://www.astro.rug.nl/~thomas/eormap.pdf
The scale of the problem:Recovering images of reionization with Generalized Morphological Component Analysis
The accurate and precise removal of 21-cm foregrounds from Epoch of
Reionization redshifted 21-cm emission data is essential if we are to gain
insight into an unexplored cosmological era. We apply a non-parametric
technique, Generalized Morphological Component Analysis or GMCA, to simulated
LOFAR-EoR data and show that it has the ability to clean the foregrounds with
high accuracy. We recover the 21-cm 1D, 2D and 3D power spectra with high
accuracy across an impressive range of frequencies and scales. We show that
GMCA preserves the 21-cm phase information, especially when the smallest
spatial scale data is discarded. While it has been shown that LOFAR-EoR image
recovery is theoretically possible using image smoothing, we add that wavelet
decomposition is an efficient way of recovering 21-cm signal maps to the same
or greater order of accuracy with more flexibility. By comparing the GMCA
output residual maps (equal to the noise, 21-cm signal and any foreground
fitting errors) with the 21-cm maps at one frequency and discarding the smaller
wavelet scale information, we find a correlation coefficient of 0.689, compared
to 0.588 for the equivalently smoothed image. Considering only the central 50%
of the maps, these coefficients improve to 0.905 and 0.605 respectively and we
conclude that wavelet decomposition is a significantly more powerful method to
denoise reconstructed 21-cm maps than smoothing.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted by MNRA
Constraining the epoch of reionization with the variance statistic: simulations of the LOFAR case
Several experiments are underway to detect the cosmic redshifted 21-cm signal
from neutral hydrogen from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). Due to their very
low signal-to-noise ratio, these observations aim for a statistical detection
of the signal by measuring its power spectrum. We investigate the extraction of
the variance of the signal as a first step towards detecting and constraining
the global history of the EoR. Signal variance is the integral of the signal's
power spectrum, and it is expected to be measured with a high significance. We
demonstrate this through results from a simulation and parameter estimation
pipeline developed for the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR)-EoR experiment. We show
that LOFAR should be able to detect the EoR in 600 hours of integration using
the variance statistic. Additionally, the redshift () and duration
() of reionization can be constrained assuming a parametrization. We
use an EoR simulation of and to test the
pipeline. We are able to detect the simulated signal with a significance of 4
standard deviations and extract the EoR parameters as and in 600 hours,
assuming that systematic errors can be adequately controlled. We further show
that the significance of detection and constraints on EoR parameters can be
improved by measuring the cross-variance of the signal by cross-correlating
consecutive redshift bins.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA
Detection and extraction of signals from the epoch of reionization using higher-order one-point statistics
Detecting redshifted 21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen in the early Universe promises to give direct constraints on the epoch of reionization (EoR). It will, though, be very challenging to extract the cosmological signal (CS) from foregrounds and noise which are orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, the signal has some characteristics which differentiate it from the foregrounds and noise, and we suggest that using the correct statistics may tease out signatures of reionization. We generate mock data cubes simulating the output of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) EoR experiment. These cubes combine realistic models for Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds and the noise with three different simulations of the CS. We fit out the foregrounds, which are smooth in the frequency direction, to produce residual images in each frequency band. We denoise these images and study the skewness of the one-point distribution in the images as a function of frequency. We find that, under sufficiently optimistic assumptions, we can recover the main features of the redshift evolution of the skewness in the 21-cm signal. We argue that some of these features ¿ such as a dip at the onset of reionization, followed by a rise towards its later stages ¿ may be generic, and give us a promising route to a statistical detection of reionization
An MCMC approach to extracting the global 21-cm signal during the cosmic dawn from sky-averaged radio observations
Efforts are being made to observe the 21-cm signal from the 'cosmic dawn'
using sky-averaged observations with individual radio dipoles. In this paper,
we develop a model of the observations accounting for the 21-cm signal,
foregrounds, and several major instrumental effects. Given this model, we apply
Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to demonstrate the ability of these
instruments to separate the 21-cm signal from foregrounds and quantify their
ability to constrain properties of the first galaxies. For concreteness, we
investigate observations between 40 and 120 MHz with the proposed DARE mission
in lunar orbit, showing its potential for science return.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures; accepted by MNRAS; minor edits to match
accepted versio
The brightness and spatial distributions of terrestrial radio sources
Faint undetected sources of radio-frequency interference (RFI) might become visible in long radio observations when they are consistently present over time. Thereby, they might obstruct the detection of the weak astronomical signals of interest. This iss