Topology of Reionisation times: concepts, measurements and comparisons to gaussian random field predictions

Abstract

In the next decade, radio telescopes like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will explore the Universe at high redshift, and particularly during the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR). The first structures emerged during this epoch, and their radiations have reionised the previously cold and neutral gas of the Universe creating ionised bubbles that percolate at the end of the EoR (at a redshift of approximately 6). SKA will produce 2D images of the distribution of the neutral gas at many redshifts, pushing us to develop tools and simulations to understand its properties. This paper aims at measuring topological statistics of the EoR in the "reionisation times" fields from both cosmological and semi-analytical simulations. This field informs us about the time of reionisation of the gas at each position, is used to probe the inhomogeneities of reionisation histories and can possibly be extracted from 21 cm maps. We also compare these measurements with analytical predictions from the gaussian random field (GRF) theory. The GRF theory allows us to compute many statistics of a field: PDFs of the field or its gradient, isocontour length, critical point distributions, and skeleton length. We compare these theoretical predictions to measurements made on reionisation time fields extracted from an EMMA and a 21cmFAST simulations at 1 a cMpc/h resolution. We also compared our results to GRFs generated from the fitted power spectra of the simulation maps. Both EMMA and 21cmFAST reionisation time fields (treion(r)) are close to be gaussian fields, in contrast with the 21 cm, density or ionisation fraction that are all proven to be non-gaussian. Only accelerating ionisation fronts at the end of the EoR seem to be a cause of small non-gaussianities in treion(r). Overall our results indicate that an analytical description of the reionisation percolation can be reasonably made within the framework of GRF theory.