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Register a new userLarge scale simulations of H and He reionization and heating driven by stars and more energetic sources
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We present simulations of cosmic reionization and reheating from $z=18$ to $z=5$, investigating the role of stars (emitting soft UV-photons), nuclear black holes (BHs, with power-law spectra), X-ray binaries (XRBs, with hard X-ray dominated spectra), and the supernova-associated thermal bremsstrahlung of the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM, with soft X-ray spectra). We post-process the hydrodynamical simulation Massive-Black II (MBII) with multifrequency ionizing radiative transfer. The source properties are directly derived from the physical environment of MBII, and our only real free parameter is the ionizing escape fraction $f_{rm esc}$. We find that, among the models explored here, the one with an escape fraction that decreases with decreasing redshift yields results most in line with observations, such as of the neutral hydrogen fraction and the Thomson scattering optical depth. Stars are the main driver of hydrogen reionization and consequently of the thermal history of the intergalactic medium (IGM). We obtain $langle x_{rm HII} rangle = 0.99998$ at $z=6$ for all source types, with volume averaged temperatures $langle T rangle sim 20,000~{rm K}$. BHs are rare and negligible to hydrogen reionization, but conversely they are the only sources which can fully ionize helium, increasing local temperatures by $sim 10^4~{rm K}$. The thermal and ionization state of the neutral and lowly ionized hydrogen differs significantly with different source combinations, with ISM and (to a lesser extent) XRBs, playing a significant role and, as a consequence, determining the transition from absorption to emission of the 21 cm signal from neutral hydrogen.
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During reionization, the intergalactic medium is heated impulsively by supersonic ionization fronts (I-fronts). The peak gas temperatures behind the I-fronts, $T_mathrm{reion}$, are a key uncertainty in models of the thermal history after reionization. Here we use high-resolution radiative transfer simulations to study the parameter space of $T_mathrm{reion}$. We show that $T_mathrm{reion}$ is only mildly sensitive to the spectrum of incident radiation over most of the parameter space, with temperatures set primarily by I-front speeds. We also explore what current models of reionization predict for $T_mathrm{reion}$ by measuring I-front speeds in cosmological radiative transfer simulations. We find that the post-I-front temperatures evolve toward hotter values as reionization progresses. Temperatures of $T_mathrm{reion} = 17,000-22,000$ K are typical during the first half of reionization, but $T_mathrm{reion} = 25,000 - 30,000$ K may be achieved near the end of this process if I-front speeds reach $sim10^4$ km/s as found in our simulations. Shorter reionization epochs lead to hotter $T_mathrm{reion}$. We discuss implications for $z>5$ Ly$alpha$ forest observations, which potentially include sight lines through hot, recently reionized patches of the Universe. Interpolation tables from our parameter space study are made publicly available, along with a simple fit for the dependence of $T_mathrm{reion}$ on the I-front speed.
We present an efficient method to generate large simulations of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) without the need for a full 3-dimensional radiative transfer code. Large dark-matter-only simulations are post-processed to produce maps of the redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen. Dark matter haloes are embedded with sources of radiation whose properties are either based on semi-analytical prescriptions or derived from hydrodynamical simulations. These sources could either be stars or power-law sources with varying spectral indices. Assuming spherical symmetry, ionized bubbles are created around these sources, whose radial ionized fraction and temperature profiles are derived from a catalogue of 1-D radiative transfer experiments. In case of overlap of these spheres, photons are conserved by redistributing them around the connected ionized regions corresponding to the spheres. The efficiency with which these maps are created allows us to span the large parameter space typically encountered in reionization simulations. We compare our results with other, more accurate, 3-D radiative transfer simulations and find excellent agreement for the redshifts and the spatial scales of interest to upcoming 21cm experiments. We generate a contiguous observational cube spanning redshift 6 to 12 and use these simulations to study the differences in the reionization histories between stars and quasars. Finally, the signal is convolved with the LOFAR beam response and its effects are analyzed and quantified. Statistics performed on this mock data set shed light on possible observational strategies for LOFAR.
Observations of the 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen indicate that an Epoch of Heating (EoH) might have preceded the later Epoch of Reionization (EoR). Here we study the effects on the ionization state and the thermal history of the Intergalactic Medium (IGM) during the EoH induced by different assumptions on ionizing sources in the high redshift Universe: (i) stars, (ii) X-ray binaries (XRBs), (iii) thermal bremsstrahlung of the hot Interstellar Medium (ISM), and (iv) accreting nuclear black holes (BHs). To this aim, we post-process outputs from the ($100 h^{-1}$ cMpc)$^3$ hydrodynamical simulation MassiveBlack-II with the cosmological 3D radiative transfer code CRASH, which follows the propagation of UV and X-ray photons, computing the thermal and ionization state of hydrogen and helium through the EoH. We find that stars determine the fully ionized morphology of the IGM, while the spectrally hard XRBs pave way for efficient subsequent heating and ionization by the spectrally softer ISM. With the seeding prescription in MassiveBlack-II, BHs do not contribute significantly to either ionization or heating. With only stars, most of the IGM remains in a cold state (with a median $T=11$ K at $z=10$), however, the presence of more energetic sources raises the temperature of regions around the brightest and more clustered sources above that of the CMB, opening the possibility to observing the 21 cm signal in emission.
Provided a random realization of the cosmological model, observations of our cosmic neighborhood now allow us to build simulations of the latter down to the non-linear threshold. The resulting local Universe models are thus accurate up to a given residual cosmic variance. Namely some regions and scales are apparently not constrained by the data and seem purely random. Drawing conclusions together with their uncertainties involves then statistics implying a considerable amount of computing time. By applying the constraining algorithm to paired fixed fields, this paper diverts the original techniques from their first use to efficiently disentangle and estimate uncertainties on local Universe simulations obtained with random fields. Paired fixed fields differ from random realizations in the sense that their Fourier mode amplitudes are fixed and they are exactly out of phase. Constrained paired fixed fields show that only 20% of the power spectrum on large scales (> tens of megaparsecs) is purely random. Namely 80% of it is partly constrained by the large scale / small scale data correlations. Additionally, two realizations of our local environment obtained with paired fixed fields of the same pair constitute an excellent non-biased average or quasi-linear realization of the latter, namely the equivalent of hundreds of constrained simulations. The variance between these two realizations gives the uncertainty on the achievable local Universe simulations. These two simulations will permit enhancing faster our local cosmic web understanding thanks to a drastically reduced required computational time to appreciate its modeling limits and uncertainties.
To exploit the power of next-generation large-scale structure surveys, ensembles of numerical simulations are necessary to give accurate theoretical predictions of the statistics of observables. High-fidelity simulations come at a towering computational cost. Therefore, approximate but fast simulations, surrogates, are widely used to gain speed at the price of introducing model error. We propose a general method that exploits the correlation between simulations and surrogates to compute fast, reduced-variance statistics of large-scale structure observables without model error at the cost of only a few simulations. We call this approach Convergence Acceleration by Regression and Pooling (CARPool). In numerical experiments with intentionally minimal tuning, we apply CARPool to a handful of GADGET-III $N$-body simulations paired with surrogates computed using COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA). We find $sim 100$-fold variance reduction even in the non-linear regime, up to $k_mathrm{max} approx 1.2$ $h {rm Mpc^{-1}}$ for the matter power spectrum. CARPool realises similar improvements for the matter bispectrum. In the nearly linear regime CARPool attains far larger sample variance reductions. By comparing to the 15,000 simulations from the Quijote suite, we verify that the CARPool estimates are unbiased, as guaranteed by construction, even though the surrogate misses the simulation truth by up to $60%$ at high $k$. Furthermore, even with a fully configuration-space statistic like the non-linear matter density probability density function, CARPool achieves unbiased variance reduction factors of up to $sim 10$, without any further tuning. Conversely, CARPool can be used to remove model error from ensembles of fast surrogates by combining them with a few high-accuracy simulations.
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