21 cm line bispectrum as a method to probe cosmic dawn and epoch of reionization

Abstract

Redshifted 21 cm signal is a promising tool to investigate the state of intergalactic medium (IGM) in the cosmic dawn (CD) and epoch of reionization (EoR). In our previous work, we studied the variance and skewness of the 21 cm fluctuations to give a clear interpretation of the 21 cm power spectrum and found that skewness is a good indicator of the epoch when X-ray heating becomes effective. Thus, the non-Gaussian feature of the spatial distribution of the 21 cm signal is expected to be useful to investigate the astrophysical effects in the CD and EoR. In this paper, in order to investigate such a non-Gaussian feature in more detail, we focus on the bispectrum of the 21 cm signal. It is expected that the 21 cm brightness temperature bispectrum is produced by non-Gaussianity due to the various astrophysical effects such as the Wouthuysen-Field effect, X-ray heating and reionization. We study the various properties of 21 cm bispectrum such as scale dependence, shape dependence and redshift evolution. And also we study the contribution from each component of 21 cm bispectrum. We find that the contribution from each component has characteristic scale-dependent feature. In particular, we find that the bulk of the 21 cm bispectrum at z = 20 comes from the matter fluctuations, while in other epochs it is mainly determined by the spin and/or neutral fraction fluctuations and it is expected that we could obtain more detailed information on the IGM in the CD and EoR by using the 21 cm bispectrum in the future experiments, combined with the power spectrum and skewness.