On using large scale correlation of the Ly-$\alpha$ forest and redshifted 21-cm signal to probe HI distribution during the post reionization era

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of detecting the 3D cross correlation power spectrum of the Ly-$\alpha$ forest and HI 21 cm signal from the post reionization epoch. The cross-correlation signal is directly dependent on the dark matter power spectrum and is sensitive to the 21-cm brightness temperature and Ly-$\alpha$ forest biases. These bias parameters dictate the strength of anisotropy in redshift space. We find that the cross-correlation power spectrum can be detected using $400 ~ \, \rm hrs$ observation with SKA-mid (phase 1) and a futuristic BOSS like experiment with a quasar (QSO) density of $30 ~ \rm deg^{-2}$ at a peak SNR of $15$ for a single field experiment at redshift $z = 2.5$. We also study the possibility of constraining various bias parameters using the cross power spectrum. We find that with the same experiment $1 \sigma$ conditional errors on the 21-cm linear redshift space distortion parameter $\beta_T$ and $\beta_{F}$ corresponding to the Ly-$\alpha $ forest are $\sim 2.7\%$ and $\sim 1.4 \%$ respectively for $10$ independent pointings of the SKA-mid (phase 1). This prediction indicates a significant improvement over existing measurements. We claim that the detection of the 3D cross correlation power spectrum will not only ascertain the cosmological origin of the signal in presence of astrophysical foregrounds but will also provide stringent constraints on large scale HI biases. This provides an independent probe towards understanding cosmological structure formation.