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Inferring the Thermal History of the Intergalactic Medium from the Properties of the Hydrogen and Helium Lyman-alpha Forest
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The filamentary network of intergalactic medium (IGM) gas that gives origin to the Lyman-alpha forest in the spectra of distant quasars encodes information on the physics of structure formation and the early thermodynamics of diffuse baryonic material. Here, we use a massive suite of more than 400 high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations run with the Graphics Processing Unit-accelerated code Cholla to study the IGM at high spatial resolution maintained over the entire computational volume. The simulations capture a wide range of possible thermal histories of intergalactic gas by varying the amplitude and timing of the photoheating and photoionizing background produced by star-forming galaxies and active galactic nuclei. A statistical comparison of synthetic spectra with the observed 1D flux power spectra of hydrogen in 14 redshift bins over the full range 2.2 <= z <= 5.0 and with the Lyman-alpha opacity of helium in 5 redshift bins over the range 2.4 < z < 2.9 tightly constrains the photoionization and photoheating history of the IGM. By leveraging the constraining power of the available Lyman-alpha forest data to break model degeneracies, we find that the IGM experienced two main reheating events from the non-equilibrium ionization of hydrogen and helium over 1.2 Gyr of cosmic time. For our best-fit model, hydrogen reionization completes by z~6.0 with a first IGM temperature peak T_0 ~ 1.3x10^4 K, and is followed by the reionization of HeII that completes by z~3.0 and yields a second temperature peak of T_0 ~ 1.4x10^4 K. We discuss how our results can be used to obtain information on the timing and the sources of hydrogen and helium reionization.
Forward citations
Cited by 6 Pith papers
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Modeling the Cosmological Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest at the Field Level
An effective-field-theory forward model reproduces the Lyman-alpha forest field from a hydrodynamic simulation at percent level, down to a few megaparsecs, using the same initial conditions.
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Ringing of the Reionization: A first direct measurement of the intergalactic pressure smoothing scale at redshift z>4.2 as imprinted onto small-scale peculiar velocities in the Lyman-alpha forest
A claimed first direct measurement of the IGM pressure smoothing scale at z≈4.2–5.0 from a fitted peak in the Lyman-alpha flux power spectrum, tied to an acoustic feature in the peculiar velocity gradient.
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Bridging Simulations and EFT: A Hybrid Model of the Lyman-Alpha Forest Field
A hybrid EFT forward model using N-body displacements reproduces the simulated Lyman-alpha forest to 5% at k <= 1 h/Mpc with a white-noise residual.
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The Compressed 3D Lyman-Alpha Forest Bispectrum
The Lyman-alpha forest bispectrum can be compressed into 26 skew spectra, including a new shifted variant, with tree-level EFT predictions matching simulations at 1-2 sigma up to k≈0.17 h/Mpc.
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Small-scale Lyman alpha forest cosmology with PRIYA: Constraints from XQ100 and KODIAQ-SQUAD one-dimensional flux power spectra
The XQ100 Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum, modeled with the PRIYA simulations, gives cosmological constraints consistent with eBOSS and Planck and constrains the IGM thermal history without external temperature data...
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Patchy Helium and Hydrogen Reionization from the Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect and Galaxies
Forecasts show that cross-correlating kSZ temperature-squared maps with galaxy-reconstructed velocity-squared maps can jointly constrain hydrogen and helium reionization, making helium measurable with CMB-HD and MegaMapper.
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