Computer Simulations of Cosmic Reionization

Abstract

The cosmic reionization of hydrogen was the last major phase transition in the evolution of the universe, which drastically changed the ionization and thermal conditions in the cosmic gas. To the best of our knowledge today, this process was driven by the ultra-violet radiation from young, star-forming galaxies and from first quasars. We review the current observational constraints on cosmic reionization, as well as the dominant physical effects that control the ionization of intergalactic gas. We then focus on numerical modeling of this process with computer simulations. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in solving the radiative transfer of ionizing photons from many sources through the highly inhomogeneous distribution of cosmic gas in the expanding universe. With modern simulations, we have finally converged on a general picture for the reionization process, but many unsolved problems still remain in this young and exciting field of numerical cosmology.

Invited Review to appear on Advanced Science Letters (ASL), Special Issue on Computational Astrophysics, edited by Lucio Mayer

Cited by in corpus (53)

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• Gas Clumping in Self-Consistent Reionisation Models
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• Light cone effect on the reionization 21-cm power spectrum
• The Global History of Reionisation
• Emulating Simulations of Cosmic Dawn for 21cm Power Spectrum Constraints on Cosmology, Reionization, and X-ray Heating
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• On the rapid demise of Lyman-alpha emitters at z>7 due to the increasing incidence of optically thick absorption systems
• SCORCH I: The Galaxy-Halo Connection in the First Billion Years
• The First Galaxies: Assembly of Disks and Prospects for Direct Detection
• A tale of two sites -- I: Inferring the properties of minihalo-hosted galaxies from current observations
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• Dark-ages Reionization and Galaxy Formation Simulation XX. The Ly$\alpha$ IGM transmission properties and environment of bright galaxies during the Epoch of Reionization
• Models of the Cosmological 21 cm Signal from the Epoch of Reionization Calibrated with Lyman-alpha and CMB Data
• SCORCH. II. Radiation-Hydrodynamic simulations of reionization with varying radiation escape fractions
• ARTIST: Fast radiative transfer for large-scale simulations of the epoch of reionisation
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• Mapping reionization bubbles in the JWST era I: empirical edge detection with Lyman alpha emission from galaxies
• Extending Semi-numeric Reionisation Models to the First Stars and Galaxies
• Growth and anisotropy of ionization fronts near high redshift quasars in the MassiveBlack simulation
• Constraining Reionization with Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies
• On improving analytical models of cosmic reionization for matching numerical simulation
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• The Contribution of AGN Accretion Disks to Hydrogen Reionization
• Probing the Inflaton Potential with SKA