On the Size of HII Regions around High Redshift Quasars

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 9 August 2006
Abstract
We investigate the possibility of constraining the ionization state of the Intergalactic Medium (IGM) close to the end of reionization (z ~ 6) by measuring the size of the HII regions in high-z quasars spectra. We perform a combination of multiphase SPH and 3D radiative transfer (RT) simulations to reliably predict the properties of typical high-z quasar HII regions, embedded in a partly neutral IGM. From the analysis of mock spectra along lines of sight through the simulated QSO environment we find that the HII region size derived from quasar spectra is on average 30 % smaller than the physical one. Additional maximum likelihood analysis shows that this offset induces an overestimate of the neutral hydrogen fraction, x_HI, by a factor ~ 3. By applying the same statistical method to a sample of observed QSOs our study favors a mostly ionized (x_HI < 0.06) universe at z=6.1.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: