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The dark age of the universe, when no luminous object had existed, ended with the birth of the first stars, galaxies, and blackholes. This epoch is called cosmic dawn. Cosmic reionization is the major transition of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in the universe driven by ionizing photons emitted from luminous objects. Although the epoch through the dark age to reionization is a milestone in the universe, our knowledge of this epoch has not been sufficient yet. Cosmic 21cm signal, which is emitted from neutral hydrogen, is expected to open a new window for this epoch. In this review paper, we first introduce the basic physics of the 21cm line and how first stars impact on the 21cm line signal. Next, we briefly summarize how we extract astrophysical information from the 21cm line signal by means of statistical and machine learning approaches. We also discuss the synergy between the 21cm line signal and other emission lines. Finally, we summarize the current status of 21cm experiments., 30 pages, 19 figures. Published in PASJ as Special Issue "Metre and Centimetre Radio Astronomy in the Next Decade"

Cosmic Reionization imprints its signature on the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Advances in CMB telescopes have already placed a significant constraint on the history of reionization. As near-future CMB telescopes target the maximum sensitivity, or observations limited only by the cosmic variance (CV), we hereby forecast the potential of future CMB observations in constraining the history of reionization. In this study, we perform Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis for CV-limited E-mode polarization observations such as the LiteBIRD (Light satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection), based on a few different methods that vary in the way of sampling reionization histories. We focus especially on estimating the very early history of reionization that occurs at redshifts $z>15$, which is quantified by the partial CMB optical depth due to free electrons at $z>15$, $τ_{z>15}$. We find that reionization with $τ_{z>15} \sim 0.008$, which are well below the current upper limit $τ_{z>15} \sim 0.02$, are achievable by reionization models with minihalo domination in the early phase and can be distinguished from those with $τ_{z>15} \lesssim 5\times 10^{-4}$ through CV-limited CMB polarization observations. An accurate estimation of $τ_{z>15}$, however, remains somewhat elusive. We investigate whether resampling the E-mode polarization data with limited spherical-harmonic modes may resolve this shortcoming., 13 pages, 18figures