Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 95, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.95.083011
Keywords
-
Funding
- W. M. Keck Foundation Fund at the Institute for Advanced Study
- Schmidt Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study
- Fund for Memberships in Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study
- Simons Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- David & Lucile Packard Foundation
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In the first paper of this series, we proposed a novel method to probe large-scale intergalactic magnetic fields during the cosmic Dark Ages, using 21-cm tomography. This method relies on the effect of spin alignment of hydrogen atoms in a cosmological setting, and on the effect of magnetic precession of the atoms on the statistics of the 21-cm brightness-temperature fluctuations. In this paper, we forecast the sensitivity of future tomographic surveys to detecting magnetic fields using this method. For this purpose, we develop a minimum-variance estimator formalism to capture the characteristic anisotropy signal using the two-point statistics of the brightness-temperature fluctuations. We find that, depending on the reionization history, and subject to the control of systematics from foreground subtraction, an array of dipole antennas in a compact-grid configuration with a collecting area slightly exceeding one square kilometer can achieve a 1 sigma detection of similar to 10(-21) Gauss comoving (scaled to present-day value) within three years of observation. Using this method, tomographic 21-cm surveys could thus probe ten orders of magnitude below current cosmic microwave background constraints on primordial magnetic fields, and provide exquisite sensitivity to large-scale magnetic fields in situ at high redshift.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available