Studying reionization with Lyα emitters

By M. McQuinn, L. Hernquist, M. Zaldarriaga, S. Dutta. 2007

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that observations of high-redshift Lyα emitters (LAEs) have the potential to provide definitive evidence for reionization in the near future. Using 200-Mpc radiative transfer simulations, we calculate the effect that patchy reionization has on the line profile, on the luminosity function, and, most interestingly, on the clustering of emitters for several realistic models of reionization. Reionization increases the measured clustering of emitters, and we show that this enhancement would be essentially impossible to attribute to anything other than reionization. Our results motivate looking for the signature of reionization in existing LAE data. We find that for stellar reionization scenarios the angular correlation function of the 58 LAEs in the Subaru Deep Field 2 = 6.6 photometric sample is more consistent with a fully ionized universe (mean volume ionized fraction x i ≈ 1) than a universe with x i 2σ confidence level. Measurements in the next year on Subaru will increase their z = 6.6 LAE sample by a factor of 5 and tighten these limits. If the clustering signature of reionization is detected in an LAE survey, a comparison with a Lyman-break or an Ha survey in the same field would confirm the reionization hypothesis. We discuss the optimal LAE survey specifications for detecting reionization, with reference to upcoming programmes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99db58c375bded51552d0290eadaadf11219cf4b

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Citations in the corpus

STATISTICS OF 207 Lyα EMITTERS AT A REDSHIFT NEAR 7: CONSTRAINTS ON REIONIZATION AND GALAXY FORMATION MODELS (2010, methodology): “Figure 22 compares the ACFs and bias of our LAEs at z = 6.6 with theoretical predictions of McQuinn et al. (2007) and Furlanetto et al. (2006).”
Systematic Identification of LAEs for Visible Exploration and Reionization Research Using Subaru HSC (SILVERRUSH). I. Program strategy and clustering properties of ∼2000 Lyα emitters at z = 6–7 over the 0.3–0.5 Gpc2 survey area (2017, methodology): “…of the neutral hydrogen at the EoR, because Lyα photons of LAEs in the ionized bubbles can selectively escape from the patchy neutral IGM with a small amount of Lyα damping wing absorption (Furlanetto et al. 2006; McQuinn et al. 2007; Lidz et al. 2009; Iliev et al. 2008; Sobacchi & Mesinger 2015).”
REIONIZATION AFTER PLANCK: THE DERIVED GROWTH OF THE COSMIC IONIZING EMISSIVITY NOW MATCHES THE GROWTH OF THE GALAXY UV LUMINOSITY DENSITY (2015, methodology): “…neutral IGM at z ∼ 7–8, one can use this technique to quantify the filling factor of ionized hydrogen at z ∼ 6.5–8 (Malhotra & Rhoads 2004; Santos 2004; McQuinn et al. 2007; Mesinger & Furlanetto 2008; Fontana et al. 2010; Stark et al. 2010, 2011; Dijkstra et al. 2011; Pentericci et al.…”
Evolution of the Intergalactic Opacity: Implications for the Ionizing Background, Cosmic Star Formation, and Quasar Activity (2008, background): “This gives credibility to analytical and numerical calculations of hydrogen reionization that make this assumption (e.g., Sokasian et al. 2003b; Furlanetto et al. 2004; McQuinn et al. 2007b; Zahn et al. 2007).”
Comparison of reionization models: radiative transfer simulations and approximate, seminumeric models (2010, methodology): “The solution to the ionization field that this algorithm obtains technically depends on the order rays are cast from each cell, but convergence studies have demonstrated that in practice a nearly identical solution is reached with different ray orderings (McQuinn et al. 2007b).”
SILVERRUSH. IV. Lyα luminosity functions at z = 5.7 and 6.6 studied with ∼1300 Lyα emitters on the 14–21 deg2 sky (2017, methodology): “Next, we compare our Lyα LF result with the theoretical results of McQuinn et al. (2007), who have derived z = 6.6 Lyα LFs for various xHI values based on their radiative transfer simulations.”
LARGE AREA SURVEY FOR z = 7 GALAXIES IN SDF AND GOODS-N: IMPLICATIONS FOR GALAXY FORMATION AND COSMIC REIONIZATION (2009, unknown): “50% at z = 6.5 (Dijkstra et al. 2007; McQuinn et al. 2007; Iliev et al. 2008) and xHI .”
The Evolution of the Intergalactic Medium (2015, background): “…the unresolved dense structures that act as sinks of ionizing photons, studies find that the sinks act to cap the maximum ionized bubble size at roughly the photon mean free path to intersect a sink (Furlanetto & Oh 2005; McQuinn et al. 2007b; Alvarez & Abel 2012; Sobacchi & Mesinger 2014).”
A Direct Precision Measurement of the Intergalactic Lyα Opacity at 2 ≤ z ≤ 4.2 (2007, background): “…timing, extent, morphology, and observational signatures (e.g., Zaldarriaga et al. 2004; Furlanetto et al. 2004; Trac & Cen 2006; Zahn et al. 2007; McQuinn et al. 2007a,b), HeII reionization has received relatively lit- tle attention (for pioneering work, see Croft et al. 1997; Sokasian et al.…”
Mapping Neutral Hydrogen during Reionization with the Lyα Emission from Quasar Ionization Fronts (2007, unknown): “…evolution of Ly -emitting galaxies (LAEs) at z > 6 (Miralda-Escudé & Rees 1998; Madau & Rees 2000; Haiman 2002; Santos 2004; Taniguchi et al. 2005; Furlanetto et al. 2006; Malhotra & Rhoads 2006; Kashikawa et al. 2006), and from their clustering properties (McQuinn et al. 2007).”
Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn with the Square Kilometre Array (2012, background): “However, if one looks more closely, then the details of the ionizing photon sources and the statistics of dense neutral photon sinks modify the shape of the power spectrum (McQuinn et al. 2007b).”
Can the intergalactic medium cause a rapid drop in Lyα emission at z > 6? (2014, background): “We also note that the attenuation in our patchy reionization models has a unimodal distribution over various sightlines (as already noted in prior Lyα emitter reionization studies; e.g. McQuinn et al. 2007; Mesinger & Furlanetto 2008b).”
INTENSITY MAPPING WITH CARBON MONOXIDE EMISSION LINES AND THE REDSHIFTED 21 cm LINE (2011, methodology): “The simulation directly resolves halos down to ∼ 1010M⊙, but smaller mass halos down to the atomic cooling mass scale ofMcool ∼ 108M⊙ are incorporated with the appropriate abundance and clustering as in McQuinn et al. (2007a).”
THE GRISM LENS-AMPLIFIED SURVEY FROM SPACE (GLASS). I. SURVEY OVERVIEW AND FIRST DATA RELEASE (2015, background): “The reduced observed Lyα flux from galaxies at z > 6 indicate that the process is still ongoing at z ≈ 6–7 (e.g., McQuinn et al. 2007; Dijkstra et al. 2011; Jensen et al. 2013; Choudhury et al. 2014).”
KECK SPECTROSCOPY OF FAINT 3 < z < 8 LYMAN BREAK GALAXIES: EVIDENCE FOR A DECLINING FRACTION OF EMISSION LINE SOURCES IN THE REDSHIFT RANGE 6 < z < 8 (2011, methodology): “Using the models of McQuinn et al. (2007) to predict what global neutral hydrogen fraction, XHI would be required to account for this decline, we find XHI ≃ 0.44, and XHI ≃ 0.51, respectively.”
Conditions for Reionizing the Universe with a Low Galaxy Ionizing Photon Escape Fraction (2019, background): “It can be an excellent tracer of a neutral IGM, as neutral H I gas resonantly scatters Lyα photons, attenuating their observable surface brightness (e.g., Miralda-Escudé and Rees 1998; Malhotra & Rhoads 2004; Santos 2004; Verhamme et al. 2006; McQuinn et al. 2007; Dijkstra 2014).”
Identification of the brightest Lyα emitters at z = 6.6 : Implications for the evolution of the luminosity function in the reionization era (2015, background): “…again, there is no definite explanation why there should be a sudden increase. iv) the most quoted reason (e.g. Santos 2004; Haiman & Cen 2005; McQuinn et al. 2007; Choudhury et al. 2014; Jensen et al. 2014) is that the observed decrease in both the evolution in the Lyα LF and the declining…”