Full-sky lensing reconstruction of 21 cm intensity maps

Abstract

ABSTRACT Weak gravitational lensing of the 21 cm radiation is expected to be an important cosmological probe for post-reionization physics. We investigate the reconstruction of the matter density perturbations using a quadratic minimum variance estimator. The next generation of line intensity mapping (LIM) surveys such as HIRAX and CHIME will cover a larger sky fraction, which requires one to account for the curvature in the sky. Thus, we extend the plane-parallel flat-sky formalism for lensing reconstruction to account for a full-sky survey using the spherical Fourier–Bessel (SFB) expansion. Using the HIRAX 21 cm survey as a basis, we make predictions for lensing-reconstruction noise in our formalism and compare our results with the predictions from the plane-parallel formalism. We find agreement with the plane-parallel noise power spectrum at small scales and a significant deviation at scales L ≲ ℓres − keqR, where R is the radius of the shell volume, keq is the wavenumber for matter–radiation equality, and ℓres is the angular resolution scale. Furthermore, we derive the SFB flat-sky reconstruction noise and compare it with the full-sky SFB case as well as the plane-parallel case, finding minor deviations from the full-sky noise due to sphericity. We also determine that, in the absence of non-Gaussian statistics of the intensity field but accounting for foregrounds, the signal-to-noise ratio for $C_\ell ^{\phi \phi }$ using our SFB estimator increases by over 100 per cent. This shows that accounting for the curved sky in LIM weak lensing will be crucial for large-scale cosmology.