Cosmic 21-cm Fluctuations as a Probe of Fundamental Physics

Abstract

Fluctuations in high-redshift cosmic 21-cm radiation provide a new window for observing unconventional effects of high-energy physics in the primordial spectrum of density perturbations. In scenarios for which the initial state prior to inflation is modified at short distances, or for which deviations from scale invariance arise during the course of inflation, the cosmic 21-cm power spectrum can in principle provide more precise measurements of exotic effects on fundamentally different scales than corresponding observations of cosmic microwave background anisotropies.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure