Neutral island statistics during reionization from 21-cm tomography

Understand

We present the prospects of extracting information about the Epoch of Reionization by identifying the remaining neutral regions, referred to as islands, in tomographic observations of the redshifted 21-cm signal.

• Using simulated data sets we show that at late times the 21-cm power spectrum is fairly insensitive to the details of the reionization process but that the properties of the neutral islands can distinguish between different reionization scenarios.
• We compare the properties of these islands with those of ionized bubbles.
• At equivalent volume filling fractions, neutral islands tend to be fewer in number but larger compared to the ionized bubbles.