We consider cosmic string cusp annihilations as a possible source of enhancement to the global background radiation temperature in $21$-cm photons at reionization. A soft photon spectrum is induced via the Bremsstrahlung and Synchrotron emission of electrons borne out of QCD jets formed off the cusp. The maximal energy density background comes from synchrotron induced photons with a string tension of $Gμ\sim 10^{-18}$. In this instance, the radiation background at reionization is heated up by $5\cdot 10^{-3} \,\, K$. We find that the depth of the absorption trough ($δT_b$) in $21$-cm at reionization is altered by one part in $10^4$ from the strings, requiring high precision measurements to be detectable. This mechanism cannot explain the $δT_b$ observed by the EDGES experiment.
Electromagnetic radiation from the cusp region of superconducting cosmic strings leads to a radio excess in the photon spectrum in the early universe and can produce a deep absorption feature in the global 21cm signal before the epoch of reionization. We study the constraints on the parameter space of superconducting strings which can be derived by demanding that the absorption feature is not larger in amplitude than what has recently been reported by the EDGES collaboration.
Primordial black holes (PBH) could account for variety of phenomena like dark matter, reionization of the Universe, early quasars, coalescence of black holes registered through gravitational waves recently. Each phenomenon relates to PBH of a specific mass range. PBH mass spectra varies in a wide range depending on specific model. Earlier we have shown that PBH with monochromatic mass distribution around $5\times 10^{16}$ g value allow to re-ionize the Universe moderately. Here we show that reionization effect and contribution to dark matter can be simultaneously enhanced with more natural ext…
Dark matter annihilation can have a strong impact on many astrophysical processes in the Universe. In the case of Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation cross sections, the annihilation rates are enhanced at late times, thus enhancing the potential annihilation signatures. We here calculate the Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation signatures during the epoch of helium reionization, the epoch where helium becomes fully ionized due to energetic photons. When considering the upper limits on the energy injection from the CMB, we find that the resulting abundance of He$^{++}$ becomes independent of the dark …
Inhomogeneous reionization enhances the 1D Lyman-$α$ forest power spectrum on large scales at redshifts $z\geq4$. This is due to coherent fluctuations in the ionized hydrogen fraction that arise from large-scale variations in the post-reionization gas temperature, which fade as the gas cools. It is therefore possible to use these relic fluctuations to constrain inhomogeneous reionization with the power spectrum at wavenumbers $\log_{10}(k/{\rm km^{-1}\,s})\lesssim -1.5$. We use the Sherwood-Relics suite of hybrid radiation hydrodynamical simulations to perform a first analysis of new Lyman-$α$…
Probing power spectrum enhancement at small scales with the SKA
National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院国家天文台);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学)
We use fully self-consistent numerical simulations of cosmic reionization, completed under the Cosmic Reionization On Computers (CROC) project, to explore how well the recombinations in the ionized IGM can be quantified by the effective "clumping factor." The density distribution in the simulations (and, presumably, in a real universe) is highly inhomogeneous and more-or-less smoothly varying in space. However, even in highly complex and dynamic environments the concept of the IGM remains reasonably well-defined; the largest ambiguity comes from the unvirialized regions around galaxies that ar…
We use the Aurora radiation-hydrodynamical simulations to study the mean free path (MFP) for hydrogen ionizing photons during the epoch of reionization. We directly measure the MFP by averaging the distance 1 Ry photons travel before reaching an optical depth of unity along random lines-of-sight. During reionization the free paths tend to end in neutral gas with densities near the cosmic mean, while after reionizaton the end points tend to be overdense but highly ionized. Despite the increasing importance of discrete, over-dense systems, the cumulative contribution of systems with $N_{\rm{HI}}…
Reionization leads to large spatial fluctuations in the intergalactic temperature that can persist well after its completion. We study the imprints of such fluctuations on the $z\sim5$ Ly$α$ forest flux power spectrum using a set of radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that model different reionization scenarios. We find that large-scale coherent temperature fluctuations bring $\sim20-60\%$ extra power at $k\sim0.002$ s/km, with the largest enhancements in the models where reionization is extended or ends the latest. On smaller scales ($k\gtrsim0.1$ s/km), we find that temperature fluctuations s…
The ionization and thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization has been of interest in recent times because of their close connection to the first stars. We present in this paper a semi-numerical code which computes the large-scale temperature and ionized hydrogen fields in a cosmologically representative volume accounting for the patchiness in these quantities arising from reionization. The code is an extension to a previously developed version for studying the growth of ionized regions, namely, Semi Numerical Code for ReionIzation with PhoTon Conservation…
The dark matter spike induced by the adiabatic growth of a massive black hole in a cuspy environment, may explain the thermal dark matter density required to fit the cut-off in the HESSJ1745-290 gamma-ray spectra as TeV dark matter signal with a background component. The spike extension appears comparable with the HESS angular resolution.
Cosmic superstrings of string theory differ from conventional cosmic strings of field theory. We review how the physical and cosmological properties of the macroscopic string loops influence experimental searches for these relics from the epoch of inflation. The universe's average density of cosmic superstrings can easily exceed that of conventional cosmic strings having the same tension by two or more orders of magnitude. The cosmological behavior of the remnant superstring loops is qualitatively distinct because the string tension is exponentially smaller than the string scale in flux compac…
The post-reionization ${\rm HI}$ 21-cm signal is an excellent candidate for precision cosmology, this however requires accurate modelling of the expected signal. Sarkar et al. (2016) have simulated the real space ${\rm HI}$ 21-cm signal, and have modelled the ${\rm HI}$ power spectrum as $P_{\rm HI}(k)=b^2 P(k)$ where $P(k)$ is the dark matter power spectrum and $b(k)$ is a (possibly complex) scale dependent bias for which fitting formulas have been provided. This paper extends these simulations to incorporate redshift space distortion and predict the expected redshift space ${\rm HI}$ 21-cm p…
The Lumina Project: CMB Optical Depth Fluctuations from Patchy Reionization
The University of Texas at Dallas(德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校);York University(约克大学);Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院);Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics(马克斯·普朗克天体物理学研究所)
Probing Direct Contributions of Galaxies and AGN to Cosmic Reionization in a Quasar Field J0226+0302 with JWST NIRCam and NIRSpec
University of Michigan(密歇根大学);Steward Observatory, University of Arizona(亚利桑那大学斯图尔德天文台);Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen(哥本哈根大学尼尔斯·玻尔研究所黎明中心);Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo(东京大学宇宙起源研究核心理论研究中心);Center for Data-Driven Discovery, Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo(东京大学宇宙起源研究核心理论中心数据驱动发现中心);Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California, Riverside(加州大学河滨分校物理与天文学系)