Seeing Wiggles without Seeing Wiggles: BAO Recovery in 21 cm Intensity Mapping with Deep Learning

Abstract: The 21 cm intensity mapping provides a promising probe of the large-scale structure. Astrophysical foregrounds, as the main source of contamination to the cosmological 21 cm signal, persist in a wedge-like region of Fourier space due to the inherent chromaticity in radio interferometric observations. The foreground avoidance strategy focuses on utilizing data from relatively clean regions with minimal foreground leakage, at the cost of losing large-scale information. Non-linear structure formation, however, couples Fourier modes across scales, leaving imprints of the missing large-scale modes in the remaining data. In this work, we employ a deep learning approach to test whether large-scale features of the 21 cm brightness temperature fields, particularly the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), can be recovered at the field level using only short-wavelength modes that are beyond the linear scales. To explicitly assess the dependence on the training cosmology, we train the network exclusively on de-wiggled simulations, providing a controlled test of whether the reconstruction arises from physical non-linear mode coupling rather than implicit encoding of BAO features. In the ideal noise-free case, the amplitude and phase of the lost modes can be restored with high fidelity. With instrumental noise included, the reconstructed amplitude becomes biased, while the phase information remains robust. The trained network also exhibits reasonable robustness to variations in the underlying cosmological model. Together, these results suggest that mode restoration offers a complementary approach for extracting cosmological information from future 21 cm intensity mapping analyses.