Morphology and topology of cosmological fields during the Epoch of Reionization

Abstract

In this thesis we have introduced a real space morphological tool, Contour Minkowski tensor (CMT) to analyse the 21cm brightness temperature field from EoR. We showed that the size and shape information of structures encoded by the eigenvalues of CMT enable us to extract maximum information from minimum number of morphological descriptors. We devised a statistical framework which will help us answer a plethora of physical questions required to model EoR with upcoming 21cm observations. We showed that we can infer bubble size information, ionization history and astrophysical properties of first sources using CMT. We devised a pipeline for constraining model parameters by comparing theory with mock observation from future radio interferometers such as the SKA I low. We have set a starting stage to extend to the more generalized 3 dimensional Minkowski tensors in order to obtain conclusive comparisons with other methods in literature. We also plan to combine our technique with other real space topological descriptors. The full potential of real space descriptors for 21 cm observations of EoR can be realized if the design of future interferometers allows for cleaner images from the cosmic dawn and EoR with improved foreground cleaning and data handling