Current status and future of cosmology with 21cm Intensity Mapping

Abstract

21cm Intensity Mapping (IM) has been proposed about 15 years ago as a cost effective method to carry out cosmological surveys and to map the 3D distribution of matter in the universe, over a large range of post EoR redshifts, from z=0 to z=6. Since then a number of pathfinder instruments have been built, such as CHIME or Tianlai. Several other ones will be commissioned in the next few years (HIRAX, CHORD, BINGO), while even larger arrays, with several thousand antennae are being considered for the next generation experiments. We will briefly review the 21cm cosmology of the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR), and we will then focus on IM for late time cosmology. After presenting some of the promises of this technique to constrain the cosmological model, dark energy and inflation, we will review some of the instrumental and scientific challenges of IM surveys. The second part of the paper presents an overview of the ongoing and future experiments, as well as recent results by GBT, CHIME and Tianlai.