The thermal history of the intergalactic medium at $3.9\le z\le 4.3$

Abstract

A new determination of the temperature of the intergalactic medium over $3.9\le z\le 4.3$ is presented. We applied the curvature method on a sample of 10 high resolution quasar spectra from the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph on the VLT/ESO. We measured the temperature at mean density by determining the temperature at the characteristic overdensity, which is tight function of the absolute curvature irrespective of $\gamma$. Under the assumption of fiducial value of $\gamma =1.4$, we determined the values of temperatures at mean density $T_0=7893_{-1226}^{+1417}$ K and $T_0=8153_{-993}^{+1224}$ K for redshift range of $3.9\le z\le 4.1$ and $4.1\le z\le 4.3$, respectively. Even though the results show no strong temperature evolution over the studied redshift range, our measurements are consistent with an intergalactic medium thermal history that includes a contribution from He II reionization.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in PASA, 9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (38)

• Constraining the Evolution of the Ionizing Background and the Epoch of Reionization with z ~ 6 Quasars II: A Sample of 19 Quasars
• Radiative transfer in a clumpy universe: IV. New synthesis models of the cosmic UV/X-ray background
• Equation of State of the Photoionized Intergalactic Medium
• Reionization after Planck: The Derived Growth of the Cosmic Ionizing Emissivity now matches the Growth of the Galaxy UV Luminosity Density
• The thermal history of the intergalactic medium
• Detection of Extended He II Reionization in the Temperature Evolution of the Intergalactic Medium
• New Measurements of the Ionizing Ultraviolet Background over 2 < z < 5 and Implications for Hydrogen Reionization
• Atomic Data for Permitted Resonance Lines of Atoms and Ions from H to Si, and S, Ar, Ca and Fe
• A Direct Precision Measurement of the Intergalactic Lyman-alpha Opacity at 2<z<4.2
• A Cosmic UV/X-ray Background Model Update
• The Evolution of Optical Depth in the Ly-alpha Forest: Evidence Against Reionization at z~6
• The one-dimensional Ly-alpha forest power spectrum from BOSS
• The Lyman-$\alpha$ forest in optically-thin hydrodynamical simulations
• Consistent modelling of the meta-galactic UV background and the thermal/ionization history of the intergalactic medium
• New Constraints on IGM Thermal Evolution from the Lyα Forest Power Spectrum
• New synthesis models of consistent extragalactic background light over cosmic time
• A Measurement of Small Scale Structure in the 2.2 < z < 4.2 Lyman-alpha Forest
• Revealing reionization with the thermal history of the intergalactic medium: new constraints from the Lyman-$\alpha$ flux power spectrum
• The UCSD HIRES/KeckI Damped Lya Abundance Database: I. The Data
• The thermal history of the intergalactic medium down to redshift z=1.5: a new curvature measurement
• Self-Consistent Modeling of Reionization in Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations
• A consistent and robust measurement of the thermal state of the IGM at $2\le z\le 4$ from a large sample of Ly$\alpha$ forest spectra: Evidence for late and rapid HeII reionization
• The UVES Spectral Quasar Absorption Database (SQUAD) Data Release 1: The first 10 million seconds
• The End of Helium Reionization at z~2.7 Inferred from Cosmic Variance in HST/COS HeII Lyman Alpha Absorption Spectra
• The Temperature-Density Relation in the Intergalactic Medium at Redshift <z>=2.4
• A consistent determination of the temperature of the intergalactic medium at redshift z=2.4
• Cutoff in the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest power spectrum: warm IGM or warm dark matter?
• Characterizing the Pressure Smoothing Scale of the Intergalactic Medium
• The intergalactic medium thermal history at redshift z=1.7--3.2 from the Lyman alpha forest: a comparison of measurements using wavelets and the flux distribution
• A New Measurement of the Temperature Density Relation of the IGM From Voigt Profile Fitting
• Empirical Verification of the Fe II Oscillator Strengths in the FUSE Bandpass
• A New Precision Measurement of the Small-Scale Line-of-Sight Power Spectrum of the Ly$\alpha$ Forest
• Continuous statistics of the Lyman-alpha forest at 0 < z < 1.6: the mean flux, flux distribution, and autocorrelation from HST FOS spectra
• A new Measurement of the Intergalactic Temperature at $z\sim 2.55-2.95$
• Thermal state of the intergalactic medium at $z\sim 2-4$
• A Novel Statistical Method for Measuring the Temperature-Density Relation in the IGM Using the $b$-$N_{\text{HI}}$ Distribution of Absorbers in the Ly$\alpha$ Forest
• Measuring the equation of state of the high-z intergalactic medium using curvature statistics
• Estimation of the temperature-density relation in the intergalactic medium at $\mathbf{z}\sim 2-4$ via Ly$\alpha$ forest

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Measuring photo-ionization rate and mean free path of HeII ionizing photons at $2.5\le z\le 3.6$: Evidence for late and rapid HeII reionization Part-II