Cosmological Forecasts from the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in 21cm Intensity Mapping

Abstract: We use the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the angular power spectrum (APS) of the 21cm line of neutral hydrogen (HI) to constrain cosmological parameters. As the BAO shift parameter can only constrain the product of the Hubble constant and the sound horizon $H_0r_s$, we combine our Fisher matrices with cosmic microwave background (CMB) Fisher matrices from the covariance of $Planck$ telescope to break this degeneracy. In particular, we find that the best constraints we can get with this method are on the Hubble parameter $h$, and the dark energy parameters $w_0$ and $w_a$. Assuming a noise level as for the BINGO telescope, we find $\sigma_h = 0.0055\;(0.8\%)$ in the $\Lambda$CDM model. For the $w$CDM model, we find $\sigma_h = 0.020\;(2.9\%)$ and $\sigma_{w_0} = 0.075\;(7.5\%)$. In the CPL parameterization, we find $\sigma_h = 0.029\;(4.4\%)$, $\sigma_{w_0} = 0.40\;(40\%)$, and $\sigma_{w_a} = 1.7$. Although these constraints improve those from $Planck$ alone, we observe the BINGO data will be more significant for the $w$CDM model. We also observe the constraints from the BAO only is not as strong as using the whole 21cm angular power spectrum, but it is less susceptible to systematic effects.