A New Constraint on the Simulation of the Intergalactic Medium through the Evolution of the Neutral Hydrogen Fraction in the Epoch of Reionization

Abstract

The thermal history of the intergalactic medium is full of extremely useful data in the field of astrophysics and cosmology. In other words, by examining this environment in different redshifts, the effects of cosmology and astrophysics can be observed side by side. Therefore, simulation is a very powerful tool to reach a suitable model for the intergalactic medium, both in terms of cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have simulated the intergalactic medium with the help of the 21cmFAST code and compared the evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction in different initial conditions. Considerable works have arbitrarily determined many important effective parameters in the thermal history of the intergalactic medium without any constraints, and usually, there is much flexibility in the modeling. Nonetheless, in this work, by focusing on the evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction in different models and comparing it with observational data, we have eliminated many simulated models and introduced only limited simulation models that could confirm the observations with sufficient accuracy. This issue becomes thoroughly vital from the point of view that in addition to restricting the models through the neutral hydrogen fraction, it can also impose restrictions on the parameters affecting its changes. However, we hope that in future works, by enhancing the observational data and increasing their accuracy, more compatible models with the history of the intergalactic medium can be achieved.

Quantifying the Tension between Cosmological Models and JWST Red Candidate Massive Galaxies

“…Because the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from star formation can ionize the neutral hydrogen at the reionization epoch, a larger SFE tends to accelerate the reionization process and finish it at an earlier time. Observations of the Lyα emitter luminosity function suggest that reionization is still ongoing at z  7 (Goto et al 2021;Wold et al 2022), consistent with the ò  0.2 picture (Minoda et al 2023;Mobina Hosseini et al 2023). It is however difficult to derive an upper-bound for ò solely from the reionization history, due to the degeneracy between ò and other astrophysical parameters.…”