SIMBAD references

Using high-redshift radio sources as background, the 21 cm forest observations probe the neutral hydrogen absorption signatures of early structures along the lines of sight. Directly sensitive to the spin temperature of the hydrogen atoms, it complements the 21 cm tomography observations, and provides information on the temperature as well as the ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM). We use a radiative transfer simulation to investigate the 21 cm forest signals during the epoch of reionization. We first confirmed that the optical depth and equivalent width (EW) are good representations of the ionization and thermal state of the IGM. The features selected by their relative optical depth are excellent tracers of ionization fields, and the features selected by their absolute optical depth are very sensitive to the IGM temperature, so the IGM temperature information could potentially be extracted from 21 cm forest observation, thus breaking a degeneracy in 21 cm tomographic observation. With the EW statistics, we predict some observational consequences for 21 cm forest. From the distributions of EWs and the number evolution of absorbers and leakers with different EWs, we see clearly the cosmological evolution of ionization state of the IGM. The number density of potentially observable features decreases rapidly with increasing gas temperature. The sensitivity of the proposed EW statistic to the IGM temperature makes it a unique and potentially powerful probe of reionization. Missing small-scale structures, such as small filaments and minihalos that are unresolved in our current simulation, and lack of an accurate calculation of the IGM temperature, however, likely have rendered the presented signals quantitatively inaccurate. Finally, we discuss the requirements of the background radio sources for such observations, and find that signals with equivalent widths larger than 1 kHz are hopeful to be detected.