Probing the Epoch of Early Baryonic Infall Through 21cm Fluctuations

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  • 3 February 2005
Abstract
After cosmological recombination, the primordial hydrogen gas decoupled from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and fell into the gravitational potential wells of the dark matter. The neutral hydrogen imprinted acoustic oscillations on the pattern of brightness fluctuations due to its redshifted 21cm absorption of the CMB. Unlike CMB temperature fluctuations which probe the power spectrum at cosmic recombination, we show that observations of the 21cm fluctuations at z ~ 20-200 can measure five separate fluctuation modes, thus providing a unique probe of the geometry and composition of the universe.

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