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Register a new userCosmological Magnetogenesis: The Biermann Battery during the Epoch of Reionization
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We investigate the effect of the Biermann battery during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) using cosmological Adaptive Mesh Refinement simulations within the framework of the SPHINX project. We develop a novel numerical technique to solve for the Biermann battery term in the Constrained Transport method, preserving both the zero divergence of the magnetic field and the absence of Biermann battery for isothermal flows. The structure-preserving nature of our numerical method turns out to be very important to minimise numerical errors during validation tests of the propagation of a Stromgren sphere and of a Sedov blast wave. We then use this new method to model the evolution of a 2.5 and 5 co-moving Mpc cosmological box with a state-of-the-art galaxy formation model within the RAMSES code. Contrary to previous findings, we show that three different Biermann battery channels emerge: the first one is associated with linear perturbations before the EoR, the second one is the classical Biermann battery associated with reionization fronts during the EoR, and the third one is associated with strong, supernova-driven outflows. While the two former channels generate spontaneously volume-filling magnetic fields with a strength on the order or below $10^{-20}$ G, the latter, owing to the higher plasma temperature and a marginally-resolved turbulent dynamo, reaches a field strength as high as $10^{-18}$ G in the intergalactic medium around massive haloes.
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The neutral hydrogen (HI) and its 21 cm line are promising probes to the reionization process of the intergalactic medium (IGM). To use this probe effectively, it is imperative to have a good understanding on how the neutral hydrogen traces the underlying matter distribution. Here we study this problem using semi-numerical modeling by combining the HI in the IGM and the HI from halos during the epoch of reionization (EoR), and investigate the evolution and the scale-dependence of the neutral fraction bias as well as the 21 cm line bias. We find that the neutral fraction bias on large scales is negative during reionization, and its absolute value on large scales increases during the early stage of reionization and then decreases during the late stage. During the late stage of reionization, there is a transition scale at which the HI bias transits from negative on large scales to positive on small scales, and this scale increases as the reionization proceeds to the end.
A major goal of observational and theoretical cosmology is to observe the largely unexplored time period in the history of our universe when the first galaxies form, and to interpret these measurements. Early galaxies dramatically impacted the gas around them in the surrounding intergalactic medium (IGM) by photoionzing the gas during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). This epoch likely spanned an extended stretch in cosmic time: ionized regions formed and grew around early generations of galaxies, gradually filling a larger and larger fraction of the volume of the universe. At some time -- thus far uncertain, but within the first billion years or so after the big bang -- essentially the entire volume of the universe became filled with ionized gas. The properties of the IGM provide valuable information regarding the formation time and nature of early galaxy populations, and many approaches for studying the first luminous sources are hence based on measurements of the surrounding intergalactic gas. The prospects for improved reionization-era observations of the IGM and early galaxy populations over the next decade are outstanding. Motivated by this, we review the current state of models of the IGM during reionization. We focus on a few key aspects of reionization-era phenomenology and describe: the redshift evolution of the volume-averaged ionization fraction, the properties of the sources and sinks of ionizing photons, along with models describing the spatial variations in the ionization fraction, the ultraviolet radiation field, the temperature of the IGM, and the gas density distribution.
Simulations estimating the differential brightness temperature of the redshifted 21-cm from the epoch of reionization (EoR) often assume that the spin temperature is decoupled from the background CMB temperature and is much larger than it. Although a valid assumption towards the latter stages of the reionization process, it does not necessarily hold at the earlier epochs. Violation of this assumption will lead to fluctuations in differential brightness temperature that are neither driven by density fluctuations nor by HII regions. Therefore, it is vital to calculate the spin temperature self-consistently by treating the Lyman-alpha and collisional coupling of spin temperature to the kinetic temperature. In this paper we develop an extension to the BEARS algorithm, originally developed to model reionization history, to include these coupling effects. Here we simulate the effect in ionization and heating for three models in which the reionization is driven by stars, miniqsos or a mixture of both.We also perform a number of statistical tests to quantify the imprint of the self-consistent inclusion of the spin temperature decoupling from the CMB. We find that the evolution of the spin temperature has an impact on the measured signal specially at redshifts higher than 10 and such evolution should be taken into account when one attempts to interpret the observational data.
The spatial fluctuations of the extragalactic background light trace the total emission from all stars and galaxies in the Universe. A multi-wavelength study can be used to measure the integrated emission from first galaxies during reionization when the Universe was about 500 million years old. Here we report arcminute-scale spatial fluctuations in one of the deepest sky surveys with the Hubble Space Telescope in five wavebands between 0.6 and 1.6 $mu$m. We model-fit the angular power spectra of intensity fluctuation measurements to find the ultraviolet luminosity density of galaxies at $z$ > 8 to be $log rho_{rm UV} = 27.4^{+0.2}_{-1.2}$ erg s$^{-1}$ Hz$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-3}$ $(1sigma)$. This level of integrated light emission allows for a significant surface density of fainter primeval galaxies that are below the point source detection level in current surveys.
The high-redshift 21 cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) is a promising observational probe of the early universe. Current- and next-generation radio interferometers such as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) and Square Kilometre Array (SKA) are projected to measure the 21 cm auto power spectrum from the EoR. Another observational signal of this era is the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which will be observed by the upcoming Simons Observatory (SO) and CMB-S4 experiments. The 21 cm signal and the contribution to the kSZ from the EoR are expected to be anti-correlated, the former coming from regions of neutral gas in the intergalactic medium and the latter coming from ionized regions. However, the naive cross-correlation between the kSZ and 21 cm maps suffers from a cancellation that occurs because ionized regions are equally likely to be moving toward or away from the observer and so there is no net correlation with the 21 cm signal. We present here an investigation of the 21 cm-kSZ-kSZ bispectrum, which should not suffer the same cancellation as the simple two-point cross-correlation. We show that there is a significant and non-vanishing signal that is sensitive to the reionization history, suggesting the statistic may be used to confirm or infer the ionization fraction as a function of redshift. In the absence of foreground contamination, we forecast that this signal is detectable at high statistical significance with HERA and SO. The bispectrum we study suffers from the fact that the kSZ signal is sensitive only to Fourier modes with long-wavelength line-of-sight components, which are generally lost in the 21 cm data sets owing to foreground contamination. We discuss possible strategies for alleviating this contamination, including an alternative four-point statistic that may help circumvent this issue.
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