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Robustness of Direct Measurements of the Mean Free Path of Ionizing Photons in the Epoch of Reionization by Satyavolu, Sindhu; Kulkarni, Girish; Keating, Laura C.; Haehnelt, Martin G. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Robustness of Direct Measurements of the Mean Free Path of Ionizing Photons in the Epoch of Reionization about?

Measurements of the mean free path of Lyman-continuum photons in the intergalactic medium during the epoch of reionization can help constrain the nature of the sources as well as sinks of hydrogen-ionizing radiation. A recent approach to this measurement has been to utilize composite spectra of multiple quasars at $z\sim 6$, and infer the mean free path after correcting the spectra for the presence of quasar proximity zones. This has revealed not only a steep drop in the mean free path from $z=5$ to $z=6$, but also potentially a mild tension with reionization simulations. We critically examine such direct measurements of the mean free path for biases due to quasar environment, incomplete reionization, and quasar proximity zones. Using cosmological radiative transfer simulations of reionization combined with one-dimensional radiative transfer calculations of quasar proximity zones, we find that the bias in the mean free path due to overdensities around quasars is minimal at $z\sim 6$. Patchiness of reionization at this redshift also does not affect the measurements significantly. Fitting our model to the data results in a mean free path of $\lambda_{\mathrm{mfp}}=1.49^{+0.47}_{-0.52

Author

Satyavolu, Sindhu; Kulkarni, Girish; Keating, Laura C.; Haehnelt, Martin G.

Published

2023

Language

EN