Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 4(421), p. 3570-3578
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.20582.x
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In the absence of complex astrophysical processes that characterize the reionization era, the 21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen (HI) in the post-reionization epoch is believed to be an excellent tracer of the underlying dark matter distribution. Assuming a background cosmology, it is modelled through (i) a bias function b(k,z), which relates HI to the dark matter distribution and (ii) a mean neutral fraction (x_{HI}) which sets its amplitude. In this paper, we investigate the nature of large scale HI bias. The post-reionization HI is modelled using gravity only N-Body simulations and a suitable prescription for assigning gas to the dark matter halos. Using the simulated bias as the fiducial model for HI distribution at z≤ 4, we have generated a hypothetical data set for the 21-cm angular power spectrum (C_{l}) using a noise model based on parameters of an extended version of the GMRT. The binned C_{l} is assumed to be measured with SNR \gtrsim 4 in the range 400 ≤ l ≤ 8000 at a fiducial redshift z=2.5. We explore the possibility of constraining b(k) using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on this simulated data. Our analysis shows that in the range 0.2