2014MNRAS.438.2474P

The correlation between 21cm fluctuations and galaxies is sensitive to the astrophysical properties of the galaxies that drove reionization. Thus, detailed measurements of the cross-power spectrum and its evolution could provide a powerful measurement of both the properties of early galaxies and the process of reionization. In this paper, we study the evolution of the cross-power spectrum between 21cm emission and galaxies using a model which combines the hierarchical galaxy formation model galform implemented within the Millennium-II dark matter simulation, with a semi-numerical scheme to describe the resulting ionization structure. We find that inclusion of different feedback processes changes the cross-power spectrum shape and amplitude. In particular, the feature in the cross-power spectrum corresponding to the size of ionized regions is significantly affected by supernovae feedback. We calculate predicted observational uncertainties of the cross-correlation coefficient based on specifications of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) combined with galaxy surveys of varying area and depth. We find that the cross-power spectrum could be detected over several square degrees of galaxy survey with galaxy redshift errors σz ≲ 0.1.