Stochasticity in the 21cm power spectrum at the epoch of reionization and cosmic dawn

Abstract

The 21cm neutral hydrogen line is likely to be a key probe for studying the epoch of reionization and comic dawn in the forthcoming decades. This prospect stimulates the development of the theoretical basis for simulating the power spectrum of this line. Because of the beam size of the upcoming radio telescopes at high redshifts, most of the theoretical models are focused on the inhomogeneities on scales above few comoving megaparsecs. Therefore, smaller scales are often neglected and modeled with approximated sub-grid models. In this study we explore whether the perturbations on small scales ($\lesssim 1h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$) can affect the 21cm signal on larger scales. Two distinct mechanism are discussed. First, we show that during the cosmic dawn small scale perturbations regulate the formation time of the first Lyman-alpha Emitters (LAE), and consequently the coupling timing of spin and kinetic temperatures. Due to the low number density of LAE, the inhomogeneity of coupling includes the shot noise and manifests itself in the observed 21cm power spectrum. Second mechanism works during the reionization when the ionized bubbles actively grow and overlap. Small scales perturbations affect the galactic properties and merger histories, and consequently the number of ionizing photons produced by each galaxy. The ionizing photons bring the perturbations from the galactic scales to the scales of ionizing fronts, affecting the 21cm power spectrum. We conclude that these two effects introduce stochasticity in the potentially observed 21cm power spectrum and, moreover, might give another perspective into the physics of the first galaxies.