Book a Fellows December SDM ticket
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HERA is the latest in the line of 21cm tomography experiments designed to detect the faint emission from neutral hydrogen during Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionization, and the last (and most sensitive) to come online before construction of Phase 1 of the Square Kilometre Array. The question of how the first luminous sources re-ionised the Universe is one of the most pressing in all of astrophysics and cosmology, and it is hoped that facilities such as JWST, HERA, and subsequently SKA will be able to yield important new insights in the not-too-distant future.
Following several years of construction, commissioning, and observing, HERA has now produced its first upper-limits on the 21cm power spectrum, which are already competitive with past measurements. Progress towards a possible first detection of the 21cm power spectrum is of broad interest to the high-redshift astronomy community, but the measurements themselves have many technical aspects and complications that require explanation and scrutiny. This specialist discussion meeting will bring together experts from across the community, allowing them to learn about this first HERA analysis in-depth, and to scrutinise the results in an open forum, with a view to enhancing community understanding of this important experiment.
This meeting will cover the key ingredients that have gone into producing the first upper limits on the high-redshift 21cm fluctuation signal from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), which were made public in mid-2021. The meeting will provide a forum for community members to learn about how these upper limits have been derived, what the current limitations and sources of error are, and to provide all-important scientific scrutiny and context for the results that will be invaluable in pushing the field of high-redshift 21cm cosmology forward. As well as technical presentations about the HERA instrument, data, and analysis techniques, talks from competing experiments and theoreticians will also be invited to provide context and allow robust scientific interrogation of these results.
Book a Fellows December SDM ticket