Redshifted 21 cm Emission From the Pre-Reionization Era II. HII Regions Around Individual Quasars

Abstract

We use cosmological simulations of reionization to predict the effect of large HII regions around individual high-redshift quasars on the possible signal from the redshifted 21cm line of neutral hydrogen in the pre-reionization era. We show that these HII regions appear as ``spectral dips'' in frequency space with equivalent widths in excess of 3 mK MHz or depths in excess of about 1.5 mK, and that they are by far the most prominent cosmological signals in the redshifted HI distribution. These spectral dips are expected to be present in almost every line of sight. If the spectral dips of a large enough sample of HII regions are well resolved in frequency space, the distribution of line depth and equivalent width in frequency with a known observing beamsize can be used to infer the HII region size distribution and the mean difference in neutral hydrogen density between the \HII regions (which may contain self-shielded neutral gas clumps) and the surrounding medium, providing a powerful test for models of reionization.