Full-Data Results of Hubble Frontier Fields: UV Luminosity Functions at $zsim6-10$ and a Consistent Picture of Cosmic Reionization


Abstract in English

We present UV luminosity functions of dropout galaxies at $zsim6-10$ with the complete Hubble Frontier Fields data. We obtain a catalog of $sim450$ dropout-galaxy candidates (350, 66, and 40 at $zsim6-7$, 8, and 9, respectively), whose UV absolute magnitudes reach $sim-14$ mag, $sim2$ mag deeper than the Hubble Ultra Deep Field detection limits. We carefully evaluate number densities of the dropout galaxies by Monte-Carlo simulations, including all lensing effects such as magnification, distortion, and multiplication of images as well as detection completeness and contamination effects in a self-consistent manner. We find that UV luminosity functions at $zsim6-8$ have steep faint-end slopes, $alphasim-2$, and likely steeper slopes, $alphalesssim-2$ at $zsim9-10$. We also find that the evolution of UV luminosity densities shows a non-accelerated decline beyond $zsim8$ in the case of $M_mathrm{trunc}=-15$, while an accelerated in the case of $M_mathrm{trunc}=-17$. We examine whether our results are consistent with the Thomson scattering optical depth from the Planck satellite and the ionized hydrogen fraction $Q_mathrm{HII}$ at $zlesssim7$ based on the standard analytic reionization model. We find that there exist reionizaiton scenarios that consistently explain all the observational measurements with the allowed parameters of $f_{rm esc}=0.17^{+0.07}_{-0.03}$ and $M_mathrm{trunc}>-14.0$ for $logxi_mathrm{ion}/[mathrm{erg}^{-1} mathrm{Hz}]=25.34$, where $f_{rm esc}$ is the escape fraction, $M_mathrm{trunc}$ is the faint limit of the UV luminosity function, and $xi_mathrm{ion}$ is the conversion factor of the UV luminosity to the ionizing photon emission rate. The length of the reionization period is estimated to be $Delta z=3.9^{+2.0}_{-1.6}$ (for $0.1<Q_mathrm{HII}<0.99$), consistent with the recent estimate from Planck.

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