Simulating the neutral hydrogen distribution during cosmic reionization
Loading...
Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Western Cape
Abstract
We improve on the physical treatment of ionising source and sink populations
in the large scale semi-numerical simulations by implementing new physically
motivated parametrizations taken from high-resolution radiative transfer
simulations, in order to account for the non-linear dependence on halo mass,
redshift and environment. This provides an efficient unique way to connect the small scale astrophysics to the large scale cosmology. These new parametrizations
allow the model to simultaneously match all current reionization observations
with only 4% photon escape fraction. These improvements result in 2-3 x
21cm power spectrum variations on small and large scales, and hence showing
the importance of accurately treating ionising sources and sinks in 21cm
simulations. We further implement time-integrated effects to accurately
track the evolution of ionising photons, inhomogeneous recombinations
and partially ionized regions during reionization. Including these effects yields
larger HII regions and a more sudden reionization, which leads to
an order of magnitude more 21cm power on large scales. We develop a
robust parameter estimation pipeline to constrain the model astrophysical parametersagainst several reionization observations. We find that future 21cm
observations provide tighter constraints on the astrophysical parameters and
complement different derived constraints from other reionization observations.
We finally employ the high redshift observations to add ionising photons from
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), in order to assess the ability of AGN-dominated
models to solely complete reionization. Unlike the case with galaxies,
the AGN-only models cannot simultaneously match all current reionization
observations. AGN-only models produce 21cm power spectrum that is 2 x
higher on all scales as compared with galaxies-dominated models.
Future 21cm surveys will play a key role to distinguishing between these two
scenarios, even though AGN are highly unlikely to drive cosmic reionization.
Description
Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Physics)