Unveiling the cosmic dawn and epoch of reionization using cosmic 21-cm signal

Abstract

The cosmological 21-cm signal from neutral hydrogen, which is considered as a promising tool, is being used to observe and study the cosmic dawn (CD) and epoch of reionization (EoR). A significant part of this thesis focuses on the semi-analytical modeling of the global HI 21-cm signal from CD considering several physical processes. Further, it investigates the nature of galaxies that dominate during CD and EoR using current available observations. In our work, we study the redshift evolution of the primordial magnetic field (PMF) during the dark ages and cosmic dawn, and prospects of constraining it in light of EDGES 21-cm signal in the `colder IGM' background. We find that the IGM heating rate due to the PMF enhances compared to the standard scenario. However, PMF is an unlikely candidate for explaining the rise of the EDGES absorption signal at lower redshift. We further consider, in detail, the heating of the IGM owing to cosmic ray protons generated by the supernovae from both early Pop~III and Pop~II stars. We show that the EDGES signal can be well fitted by the cosmic ray heating along with the Lyman-$\alpha$ coupling and the dark matter-baryon interaction. We, further, explore the conditions by which the EDGES detection is consistent with current reionization and post-reionization observations. By coupling a physically motivated source model derived from radiative transfer hydrodynamic simulations of reionization to a MCMC sampler, we find that high contribution from low-mass halos along with high photon escape fractions are required to simultaneously reproduce the existing constraints. With the extreme effort in building more advanced and sophisticated telescopes, the future 21-cm signal detection would be able to provide better constraints on the amplitude of PMF and the efficiencies on cosmic ray protons, and consequently on early star formation rates.