Quasars as probes of cosmological reionization

Abstract

Quasars are the most luminous non-transient sources in the epoch of cosmological reionization (i.e., which ended a billion years after the Big Bang, corresponding to a redshift of z ~ 5), and are powerful probes of the inter-galactic medium at that time. This review covers current efforts to identify high-redshift quasars and how they have been used to constrain the reionization history. This includes a full description of the various processes by which neutral hydrogen atoms can absorb/scatter ultraviolet photons, and which lead to the Gunn-Peterson effect, dark gap and dark pixel analyses, quasar near zones and damping wing absorption. Finally, the future prospects for using quasars as probes of reionization are described.

Book chapter in 'Understanding the Epoch of Cosmic Reionization: Challenges and Progress', Springer International Publishing, ed. Andrei Mesinger, ISBN 978-3-319-21956-1

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Improved upper limits on the 21-cm signal power spectrum of neutral hydrogen at $\mathbf{z}\approx 9.1$ from LOFAR
• Reionization history constraints from neural network based predictions of high-redshift quasar continua
• Damping wings in the Lyman-α forest: a model-independent measurement of the neutral fraction at 5.4<z<6.1
• The primordial environment of supermassive black holes (II): deep Y and J band images around the z=6.3 quasar SDSS J1030+0524
• The Near and Mid-infrared photometric properties of known redshift $z\ge 5$ Quasars
• Statistical analysis of the causes of excess variance in the 21 cm signal power spectra obtained with the Low-Frequency Array
• Lyman-$\alpha$ feedback prevails at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the first galaxies, stars, and star clusters
• Probing Gravitational Lensing of the CMB with SDSS-IV Quasars
• Rayleigh and Raman scattering cross-sections and phase matrices of the ground-state hydrogen atom, and their astrophysical implications
• Joint Bayesian Estimation of Quasar Continua and the Lyman-Alpha Forest Flux Probability Distribution Function
• pop-cosmos: Insights from generative modeling of a deep, infrared-selected galaxy population