No Arabic abstract
We show that the algorithm based on the weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) scheme with anti-diffusive flux corrections can be used as a solver of the radiative transfer equations. This algorithm is highly stable and robust for solving problems with both discontinuities and smooth solution structures. We test this code with the ionized sphere around point sources. It shows that the WENO scheme can reveal the discontinuity of the radiative or ionizing fronts as well as the evolution of photon frequency spectrum with high accuracy on coarse meshes and for a very wide parameter space. This method would be useful to study the details of the ionized patch given by individual source in the epoch of reionization. We demonstrate this method by calculating the evolution of the ionized sphere around point sources in physical and frequency spaces. It shows that the profile of the fraction of neutral hydrogen and the ionized radius are sensitively dependent on the intensity of the source.
A radiative transfer scheme is presented, based on a moment description of the equation of radiative transfer and the so-called ``M1 closure model for the Eddington tensor. This model features a strictly hyperbolic transport step for radiation: it has been implemented using standard Godunov--like techniques in a new code called ATON. Coupled to simple models of ionization chemistry and photo-heating, ATON is able to reproduce the results of other schemes on a various set of standard tests such as the expansion of a HII region, the shielding of the radiation by dense clumps and cosmological ionization by multiple sources. Being simple yet robust, such a scheme is intended to be naturally and easily included in grid--based cosmological fluid solvers.
We present a new hybrid code for large volume, high resolution simulations of cosmic reionization, which utilizes a N-body algorithm for dark matter, physically motivated prescriptions for baryons and star formation, and an adaptive ray tracing algorithm for radiative transfer of ionizing photons. Two test simulations each with 3 billion particles and 400 million rays in a 50 Mpc/h box have been run to give initial results. Halos are resolved down to virial temperatures of 10^4 K for the redshift range of interest in order to robustly model star formation and clumping factors. This is essential to correctly account for ionization and recombination processes. We find that the halos and sources are strongly biased with respect to the underlying dark matter, re-enforcing the requirement of large simulation boxes to minimize cosmic variance and to obtain a qualitatively correct picture of reionization. We model the stellar initial mass function (IMF), by following the spatially dependent gas metallicity evolution, and distinguish between the first generation, Population III (PopIII) stars and the second generation, Population II (PopII) stars. The PopIII stars with a top-heavy IMF produce an order of magnitude more ionizing photons at high redshifts z>10, resulting in a more extended reionization. In our simulations, complete overlap of HII regions occurrs at z~6.5 and the computed mass and volume weighted residual HI fractions at 5<z<6.5 are both in good agreement with high redshift quasar absorption measurements from SDSS. The values for the Thomson optical depth are consistent within 1-sigma of the current best-fit value from third-year WMAP.
We present the first calculation of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect due to the inhomogeneous reionization of the universe based on detailed large-scale radiative transfer simulations of reionization. The resulting sky power spectra peak at l=2000-8000 with maximum values of l^2C_l~1times10^{-12}. The peak scale is determined by the typical size of the ionized regions and roughly corresponds to the ionized bubble sizes observed in our simulations, ~5-20 Mpc. The kSZ anisotropy signal from reionization dominates the primary CMB signal above l=3000. This predicted kSZ signal at arcminute scales is sufficiently strong to be detectable by upcoming experiments, like the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and South Pole Telescope which are expected to have ~1 resolution and ~muK sensitivity. The extended and patchy nature of the reionization process results in a boost of the peak signal in power by approximately one order of magnitude compared to a uniform reionization scenario, while roughly tripling the signal compared with that based upon the assumption of gradual but spatially uniform reionization. At large scales the patchy kSZ signal depends largely on the ionizing source efficiencies and the large-scale velocity fields: sources which produce photons more efficiently yield correspondingly higher signals. The introduction of sub-grid gas clumping in the radiative transfer simulations produces significantly more power at small scales, and more non-Gaussian features, but has little effect at large scales. The patchy nature of the reionization process roughly doubles the total observed kSZ signal for l~3000-10^4 compared to non-patchy scenarios with the same total electron-scattering optical depth.
Molecular line-transition lists are an essential ingredient for radiative-transfer calculations. With recent databases now surpassing the billion-lines mark, handling them has become computationally prohibitive, due to both the required processing power and memory. Here I present a temperature-dependent algorithm to separate strong from weak line transitions, reformatting the large majority of the weaker lines into a cross-section data file, and retaining the detailed line-by-line information of the fewer strong lines. For any given molecule over the 0.3--30 {micron} range, this algorithm reduces the number of lines to a few million, enabling faster radiative-transfer computations without a significant loss of information. The final compression rate depends on how densely populated is the spectrum. I validate this algorithm by comparing Exomols HCN extinction-coefficient spectra between the complete (65 million line transitions) and compressed (7.7 million) line lists. Over the 0.6--33 {micron} range, the average difference between extinction-coefficient values is less than 1%. A Python/C implementation of this algorithm is open-source and available at https://github.com/pcubillos/repack . So far, this code handles the Exomol and HITRAN line-transition format.
We have developed a modular semi-numerical code that computes the time and spatially dependent ionization of neutral hydrogen (HI), neutral (HeI) and singly ionized helium (HeII) in the intergalactic medium (IGM). The model accounts for recombinations and provides different descriptions for the photoionization rate that are used to calculate the residual HI fraction in ionized regions. We compare different semi-numerical reionization schemes to a radiative transfer (RT) simulation. We use the RT simulation as a benchmark, and find that the semi-numerical approaches produce similar HII and HeII morphologies and power spectra of the HI 21cm signal throughout reionization. As we do not track partial ionization of HeII, the extent of the double ionized helium (HeIII) regions is consistently smaller. In contrast to previous comparison projects, the ionizing emissivity in our semi-numerical scheme is not adjusted to reproduce the redshift evolution of the RT simulation, but directly derived from the RT simulation spectra. Among schemes that identify the ionized regions by the ratio of the number of ionization and absorption events on different spatial smoothing scales, we find those that mark the entire sphere as ionized when the ionization criterion is fulfilled to result in significantly accelerated reionization compared to the RT simulation. Conversely, those that flag only the central cell as ionized yield very similar but slightly delayed redshift evolution of reionization, with up to 20% ionizing photons lost. Despite the overall agreement with the RT simulation, our results suggests that constraining ionizing emissivity sensitive parameters from semi-numerical galaxy formation-reionization models are subject to photon nonconservation.