Visualizing the cosmic dawn and the epoch of reionization

Abstract

The epoch of reionization is one of the most illusive and least know period in the history of our Universe. One of the direct ways to probe this epoch is via observation of the 21 cm line transition from the neutral hydrogen (HI). There are several radio telescopes all around the world that are trying observe this era through this 21 cm line. Through a detailed observation of this era one hopes to get a better understanding of the formation of the present day complicated structures around us. However, once such observations are successful one would need to interpret them using various physical models. Various realistic simulations of reionization are continuously being developed with the aim of understanding the physical processes that has happened during the reionization and their impact on the 21 cm observables from this era. In this project we have used visualizations as a tool to understand the differences and connections between different kind of simulated reionization scenarios. Here we apply our visualization techniques to understand two specific aspects of reionization through simulations. The first being the impact of different kinds of dark matter models and how they affect the structure formation and in turn the reionization history and neutral hydrogen topology. The second being the impact of different kinds of source models for the production of ionizing photons on the resulting 21 cm signal and HI topology during the EoR. Through our analysis, we find that efficient visualizations can provide us very interesting insights in to the dark matter model, source model and the physics of reionization.