The post-recombination streaming of baryons through dark matter keeps baryons out of low mass (<10^6 solar masses) halos coherently on scales of a few comoving Mpc. It has been argued that this will have a large impact on the 21-cm signal before and after reionization, as it raises the minimum mass required to form ionizing sources. Using a semi-numerical code, we show that the impact of the baryon streaming effect on the 21-cm signal during reionization (redshifts z approximately 7-20) depends strongly on the cooling scenario assumed for star formation, and the corresponding virial temperature or mass at which stars form. For the canonical case of atomic hydrogen cooling at 10^4 Kelvin, the minimum mass for star formation is well above the mass of halos that are affected by the baryon streaming and there are no major changes to existing predictions. For the case of molecular hydrogen cooling, we find that reionization is delayed by a change in redshift of approximately 2 and that more relative power is found in large modes at a given ionization fraction. However, the delay in reionization is degenerate with astrophysical assumptions, such as the production rate of UV photons by stars.
Horizon-preserving dualities and perturbations in non-canonical scalar field cosmologies
We generalize the cosmological duality between inflation and cyclic contraction under the interchange $a \leftrightarrow H$ to the case of non-canonical scalar field theories with varying speed of sound. The single duality in the canonical case generalizes to a family of three dualities constructed to leave the cosmological acoustic horizon invariant. We find three classes of models: (I) DBI inflation, (II) the non-canonical generalization of cyclic contraction, and (III) a new cosmological solution with rapidly decreasing speed of sound and relatively slowly growing scale factor, which we dub {\it stalled} cosmology. We construct dual analogs to the inflationary slow roll approximation, and solve for the curvature perturbation in all three cases. Both cyclic contraction and stalled cosmology predict a strongly blue spectrum for the curvature perturbations inconsistent with observations.
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