The bispectrum and 21-cm foregrounds during the Epoch of Reionization

Numerous studies have established the theoretical potential of the 21-cm bispectrum to boost our understanding of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). We take a first look at the impact of foregrounds (FGs) and instrumental effects on the 21-cm bispectrum and our ability to measure it. Unlike the power spectrum for which (in the absence of instrumental effects) there is a window clear of smooth-spectrum FGs in which it may be detectable, there is no such 'EoR window' for the bispectrum. For the triangle configurations and scales we consider, the EoR structures are completely swamped by those of the FGs, and the EoR + FG bispectrum is entirely dominated by that of the FGs. By applying a rectangular window function on the sky combined with a Blackman-Nuttall filter along the frequency axis, we find that spectral, or in our case scale, leakage (caused by FFTing non-periodic data) suppresses the FG contribution so that cross-terms of the EoR and FGs dominate. While difficult to interpret, these findings motivate future studies to investigate whether filtering can be used to extract information about the EoR from the 21-cm bispectrum. We also find that there is potential for instrumental effects to seriously corrupt the bispectrum. FG removal using GMCA (generalized morphological component analysis) is found to recover the EoR bispectrum to a reasonable level of accuracy for many configurations. Further studies are necessary to understand the error and/or bias associated with FG removal before the 21-cm bispectrum can be practically applied in analysis of future data.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that foreground effects can overwhelm the EoR structures in the 21-cm bispectrum, while applying specific filtering techniques may help reduce the impact of foregrounds. Additionally, instrumental effects should be carefully considered as they can significantly corrupt the bispectrum, necessitating a thorough understanding of the errors and biases associated with foreground removal before practical application in data analysis.