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Published on: August 12, 2013
Lensing of 21-cm fluctuations by primordial gravitational waves
Laura Book1, Marc Kamionkowski, Fabian Schmidt
1California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.
Abstract:
Weak-gravitational-lensing distortions to the intensity pattern of 21-cm radiation from the dark ages can be decomposed geometrically into curl and curl-free components. Lensing by primordial gravitational waves induces a curl component, while the contribution from lensing by density fluctuations is strongly suppressed. Angular fluctuations in the 21-cm background extend to very small angular scales, and measurements at different frequencies probe different shells in redshift space. There is thus a huge trove of information with which to reconstruct the curl component of the lensing field, allowing tensor-to-scalar ratios conceivably as small as r~10(-9)-far smaller than those currently accessible-to be probed.
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