Related papers: Physics of Cosmic Reionization
I give a brief overview of cosmic ray physics, highlighting some key questions and how they will be addressed by new experiments.
We use cosmological simulations to explore the large-scale effects of reionization. Since reionization is a process that involves a large dynamic range - from galaxies to rare bright quasars - we need to be able to cover a significant…
I describe briefly the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) physics which explains why high accuracy observations of its spatial structure are a unique observational tool both for the determination of the global cosmological…
We present a semi-analytic model for the thermal and ionization history of the universe at 1000 >~ z >~ 3. This model incorporates much of the essential physics included in full-scale hydrodynamical simulations, such as (1) gravitational…
The cosmological coincidences between the matter and radiation energy densities at recombination as well as between the densities of matter and the cosmological constant at present time are well known. We point out that moreover the third…
Observations of the high-redshift Universe with the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral hydrogen promise to open an entirely new window onto the early phases of cosmic structure formation. Here we review the physics of the 21 cm transition,…
Although empirical evidence indicates that that the universe's gas had become ionized by redshift z ~ 6, the mechanism by which this transition occurred remains unclear. In this article, we explore the possibility that dark matter…
Cosmic rays represent one of the most fascinating research themes in modern astronomy and physics. After almost a century since their discovery, a huge amount of scientific literature has been written on this topic and it is not always easy…
Cosmic background radiation, both diffuse and discrete in nature, produced at different cosmic epochs before and after recombination, provides key information on the evolution of cosmic structures. We discuss the main classes of sources…
The identification of sources driving cosmic reionization, a major phase transition from neutral Hydrogen to ionized plasma around 600-800 Myr after the Big Bang (Dayal et al. 2018, Mason et al. 2019, Robertson et al. 2022), has been a…
We study the observed cosmic ionizing background as a constraint on the nature of the sources responsible for the reionization of the Universe. In earlier work, we showed that extrapolations of the Ultra-Violet Luminosity Function (LF) of…
Determining when and how the first galaxies reionized the intergalactic medium (IGM) promises to shed light on both the nature of the first objects and the cosmic history of baryons. Towards this goal, quasar absorption lines play a unique…
The ionizing background determines the ionization balance and the thermodynamics of the cosmic gas. It is therefore a fundamental ingredient to theoretical and empirical studies of both the IGM and galaxy formation. We present here a new…
In popular cold dark matter cosmological scenarios, stars may have first appeared in significant numbers around a redshift of 10 or so, as the gas within protogalactic halos with virial temperatures in excess of 20,000 K (corresponding to…
Cosmic (hydrogen) reionization marks one of the major phase transitions of the universe at redshift z >= 6. During this epoch, hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium (IGM) were ionized by Lyman continuum (LyC) photons. However, it…
A remarkable result of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations is that the universe was significantly reionized at large redshifts. The standard explanation is that massive stars formed early and reionized the universe…
This thesis investigates the Epoch of Cosmic Reionization (EoR), a key period in the early Universe when the first luminous sources formed and their radiation transformed the intergalactic medium (IGM) from neutral to ionized. Understanding…
I present first principle model calculations for the reionization of the Universe, which provide simple diagnostics to identify the reionization sources. Within this frame, I also discuss the results derived from the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field…
We study the reionization history of the Universe in cosmological models with non-Gaussian density fluctuations, taking them to have a renormalized $\chi^2$ probability distribution function parametrized by the number of degrees of freedom,…
The early reionization (ERE) is supposed to be a physical process which happens after recombination, but before the instantaneous reionization caused by the first generation of stars. We investigate the effect of the ERE on the temperature…