Journal article
Epoch of reionization parameter estimation with the 21-cm bispectrum
CA Watkinson, B Greig, A Mesinger
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2022
Abstract
We present the first application of the isosceles bispectrum to MCMC parameter inference from the cosmic 21-cm signal. We extend the MCMC sampler 21CMMC to use the fast bispectrum code, BiFFT, when computing the likelihood. We create mock 1000-h observations with SKA1-low, using pyObs21 to account for uv-sampling and thermal noise. Assuming the spin temperature is much higher than that of the cosmic microwave background, we consider two different reionization histories for our mock observations: fiducial and late-reionization. For both models we find that bias on the inferred parameter means and 1σ credible intervals can be substantially reduced by using the isosceles bispectrum (calculated ..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
CAW's research is currently supported by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, grant number MR/S016066/1 (PI Alkistis Pourtsidou). CAW also thanks Jonathan Pritchard for financial support during the early stages of this project via the European Research Council (ERC) grant number 638743-FIRSTDAWN, as well as the ARC Centre for Excellence in All-Sky Astrophysics in 3D Visitor Fund. This research utilized Queen Mary's Apocrita HPC facility, supported by QMUL ITS Research. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.438045.Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. AM acknowledges support from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmes (AIDA -#638809). The results presented here reflect the authors' views; the ERC is not responsible for their use.