Related papers: The Infancy of Cosmic Reionization
Observations of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) have the potential to answer long-standing questions of astrophysical interest regarding the nature of the first luminous sources and their effects on the intergalactic medium (IGM). We…
One of the key observables of the reionization era is the distribution of neutral and ionized gas. Recently, Furlanetto, Zaldarriaga, & Hernquist developed a simple analytic model to describe the growth of HII regions during this era. Here,…
We explore the clustering properties of high redshift dark matter halos, focusing on halos massive enough to host early generations of stars or galaxies at redshift 10 and greater. Halos are extracted from an array of dark matter…
The universe goes through several phase transitions during its formative stages. Cosmic reionization is the last of them, where ultraviolet and X-ray radiation escape from the first generations of galaxies heating and ionizing their…
We show that the cosmic star formation rate per comoving volume should exhibit a distinct drop around the reionization redshift, when the HII regions in the intergalactic medium around individual ionizing sources first overlapped. The drop…
We consider the degree to which "21 cm tomography" of the high-redshift Universe can distinguish different ionization histories. Using a new analytic model for the size distribution of HII regions that associates these ionized bubbles with…
In Loeb & Rybicki (1999; paper I) it was shown that before reionization, the scattering of \lya photons from a cosmological source might lead to a fairly compact ($\sim 15''$) \lya halo around the source. Observations of such halos could…
We develop a count-in-cells approach to the distribution of ultraviolet background fluctuations that includes source clustering. We demonstrate that an exact expression can be obtained if the clustering of ionizing sources follows the…
Semi-analytic models are a valuable tool to study the first stars and galaxies. Their numerical efficiency makes it possible to survey broad regions of astrophysical parameter space across large volumes and redshift ranges. Following…
We consider the effects of inhomogeneous reionization on the distribution of galaxies at high redshifts. Modulation of the formation process of the ionizing sources by large scale density modes makes reionization inhomogeneous and…
Density inhomogeneity in the intergalactic medium (IGM) can boost the recombination rate of ionized gas substantially, affecting the growth of HII regions during reionization. Previous attempts to quantify this effect typically failed to…
Recent observations on the cosmic microwave background by Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe(WMAP) strongly suggest that the reionization of the universe took place quite early (z \sim 17). On the other hand, it has been pointed out that…
We compare the available catalogs of $z\approx6$ galaxies in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (UDF) and in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) with the expected properties of the sources of cosmological reionization from our…
We introduce a versatile and spatially resolved morphological characterisation of binary fields, rooted in the opening transform of mathematical morphology. We subsequently apply it to the thresholded ionization field in simulations of…
During the epoch of reionization, the formation of radiation sources is accompanied by the growth of a H- photodissociating flux. We estimate the impact of this flux on the formation of molecular hydrogen and cooling in the first galaxies,…
Using the largest cosmological reionization simulation to-date (~24 billion particles), we use the genus curve to quantify the topology of neutral hydrogen distribution on scales > 1 Mpc as it evolves during cosmological reionization. We…
In this paper we investigate the effects that a dynamic dark energy component dominant in the universe at late epochs has on reionization. We follow the evolution of HII regions with the analytic approach of Furlanetto and Oh (2005) in two…
We discuss currently available observational constraints on the reionization history of the intergalactic medium (IGM), and the extent to which accreting black holes (BHs) can help explain these observations. We show new evidence, based on…
Proto-galaxies forming in low-mass dark matter haloes are thought to provide the majority of ionizing photons needed to reionize the Universe, due to their high escape fractions of ionizing photons. We study how the escape fraction in…
The statistical properties of ionisation structures during the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) provide valuable insights into the formation of the first stars and galaxies. However, statistics such as size distributions of ionisation structures…