Journal article
Simulated metal and HI absorption lines at the conclusion of reionization
LA García, E Tescari, EV Ryan-Weber, JSB Wyithe
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2017
Abstract
We present a theoretical study of intergalactic metal absorption lines imprinted in the spectra of distant quasars during and after the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). We use high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations at high redshift (4 < z < 8), assuming a uniform UV background Haardt-Madau 12, post-processing with CLOUDY photoionization models and Voigt profile fitting to accurately calculate column densities of the ions C II, CIV, Si II, Si IV and OI in the intergalactic medium (IGM). In addition, we generate mock observations of neutral hydrogen (H I) at z < 6. Our simulations successfully reproduce the evolution of the cosmological mass density (Ω) of CII and C IV, with ΩC II exceeding ΩC..
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Funding Acknowledgements
Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAAS-TRO), through project number CE110001020. The numerical simulations were run using the Raijin distributed-memory cluster from the NCI facility, post-processed with the Edward HPC machine from the University of Melbourne and analysed with the gSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne University of Technology. This work was supported by the Flagship Allocation Scheme of the NCI National Facility at the ANU. The authors acknowledge CAASTRO for funding and allocating time for the project Diagnosing hydrogen reionization with metal absorption line ratios (fy6) during 2015 and 2016. LAG thanks Valentina D'Odorico and Neil Crighton for providing their observational data in private communications and Jeff Cooke for the insightful discussions. ERW acknowledges ARC DP 1095600. We also thank the anonymous referee for providing valuable comments that considerably improved our manuscript and Klaus Dolag for his help with the technical details of the SPH code.