Recovering the Coupled Treatment of Redshift-Space Distortions and the Lightcone Effect after Diffuse Foreground Removal

Abstract

The 21 cm brightness temperature during the Epoch of Reionisation is widely modelled using semi-numeric simulations, used for their computational speed and flexibility in testing astrophysical and cosmological parameters. However, it is common practice to simulate coeval brightness temperature boxes, and then apply post-processing algorithms that treat the lightcone effect and redshift-space distortions separately, assuming they can be added in sequence. We instead model them together, allowing for partial coeval cell contributions, and ensuring that velocity-induced frequency shifts are computed at the correct cosmic time for every position along the line of sight. We show that considering these effects simultaneously creates a difference in the shape of the power spectrum over all Fourier scales, and remains recoverable after semi-blind foreground removal. We show that our lightcones consist of an average of 8% and maximum of 120% of a coeval cell length. These contributions to a 21cm brightness temperature lightcone voxel are shifted from within a +/- 0.5 MHz range of the emitted frequency. The boost in the power spectrum seen over small scales (k>1.5 Mpc) of our robust 21 cm lightcone method compared to basic methods is recoverable after the addition and removal of diffuse radio foregrounds. The largest differences during the Epoch of Reionisation lie in the k-space, where the noise sensitivity for a 1000-hour SKAO-low observation is greater than the signal. However, in the cosmic dawn, we have shown that the major differences lie outside of this noise-dominated region.