Simulating Reionization in Numerical Cosmology
Preprint
- 10 May 2001
Abstract
The incorporation of radiative transfer effects into cosmological hydrodynamical simulations is essential for understanding how the intergalactic medium (IGM) makes the transition from a neutral medium to one that is almost fully ionized. Here, we present an approximate numerical method designed to study in a statistical sense how a cosmological density field is ionized by a set of discrete point sources. A diffuse background radiation field is also computed self-consistently in our procedure. The method requires relatively few time steps and can be employed with simulations having high resolution. We describe the details of the algorithm and provide a description of how the method can be applied to the output from a pre-existing cosmological simulation to study the systematic reionization of a particular ionic species. As a first application, we compute the reionization of He II by quasars in the redshift range 3 to 6.Keywords
All Related Versions
- Version 1, 2001-05-10, ArXiv
- Published version: New Astronomy, 6 (6), 359.
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: