activity
20242026
collaborators

12 papers

astro-ph.CO2026

The Challenge of Observing Patchy Reionization with CMB Optical-Depth Fluctuations

Nick Takoudes, Hanjue Zhu, Nickolay Y. Gnedin

Spatial fluctuations in the Thomson optical depth encode information about the inhomogeneous nature of cosmic reionization. We compute the optical-depth angular power spectrum, $C_…

astro-ph.CO2026

Photon (Non)Conservation in the Reduced Speed of Light Approximation and How to (Almost) Fix It

Nickolay Y. Gnedin

The "Reduced Speed of Light" (RSL) approximation is commonly used to speed up radiative transfer calculations in cosmological simulations. However, it has been shown previously tha…

astro-ph.CO2026

Second Order Closures for the Radiative Transfer Equation: Some Are Unstable

Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Harley Katz

The largest existing simulations of cosmic reionization model radiative transfer with moment methods that require a closure relation. The two most commonly used closure relations a…

astro-ph.CO2025

Effects of Primordial Black Holes on IGM History

Emily Koivu, Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Christopher M. Hirata

Currently the asteroid mass window (mass grams) remains unconstrained for Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) to make up all of the dark matter content of the uni…

astro-ph.CO2025

Damping Wing-Like Features in the Spectra of High Redshift Quasars: a Challenge for Fully-Coupled Simulations

Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Hanjue Zhu

Recently, several observational detections of damping-wing-like features at the edges of ``dark gaps" in the spectra of distant quasars (the ``Malloy-Lidz effect") have been report…

astro-ph.CO2025

Do We Know How to Model Reionization?

Nickolay Y. Gnedin

I compare the power spectra of the radiation fields from two recent sets of fully coupled simulations that model cosmic reionization: "Cosmic Reionization On Computers" (CROC) and…