Cosmic Radiative Feedback from Reionization

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cosmic radiative feedback influences the thermal history of the intergalactic medium during reionization, highlighting the potential of future 21-cm and CMB observations to distinguish between models.

Contribution

It compares different feedback prescriptions and assesses their impact on reionization and thermal histories, emphasizing the need for precise foreground removal in future observations.

Findings

Current data cannot distinguish between reionization models.

Future 21-cm and CMB observations can break model degeneracies.

Foreground removal at percent level is crucial for model discrimination.

Abstract

We explore the effect of cosmic radiative feedback from the sources of reionization on the thermal evolution of the intergalactic medium. We find that different prescriptions for this feedback predict quite different thermal and reionization histories. In spite of this, current data can not discriminate among different reionization scenarios. We find that future observations both from 21-cm and CMB experiments can be used to break the degeneracy among model parameters provided that we will be able to remove the foreground signal at the percent (or better) level.