A New Calculation of the Ionizing Background Spectrum and the Effects of HeII Reionization

TL;DR

This paper presents a new calculation of the cosmic ionizing background spectrum, incorporating empirical constraints, and explores the effects of HeII reionization on the intergalactic medium's thermal and ionization state.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, empirically constrained model of the ionizing background spectrum, including the impact of HeII reionization and recombination emission effects.

Findings

Star-forming galaxies dominate the ionizing background at z<3.

Recombinations do not linearly increase ionization rates due to energy distribution.

HeII reionization significantly suppresses the spectrum above 54.4 eV and heats the IGM.

Abstract

The ionizing background determines the ionization balance and the thermodynamics of the cosmic gas. It is therefore a fundamental ingredient to theoretical and empirical studies of both the IGM and galaxy formation. We present here a new calculation of its spectrum that satisfies the empirical constraints we recently obtained by combining state-of-the-art luminosity functions and intergalactic opacity measurements. In our preferred model, star-forming galaxies and quasars each contribute substantially to the HI ionizing field at z<3, with galaxies rapidly overtaking quasars at higher redshifts as quasars become rarer. In addition to our fiducial model, we explore the physical dependences of the calculated background and clarify how recombination emission contributes to the ionization rates. We find that recombinations do not simply boost the ionization rates by the number of reemitted ionizing photons as many of these rapidly redshift below the ionization edges and have a distribution of energies. A simple analytic model that captures the main effects seen in our numerical radiative transfer calculations is given. Finally, we discuss the effects of HeII reionization by quasars on both the spectrum of the ionizing background and on the thermal history of the IGM. In regions that have yet to be reionized, the spectrum is expected to be almost completely suppressed immediately above 54.4 eV while a background of higher-energy (>~0.5 keV) photons permeates the entire universe owing to the frequency-dependence of the photoionization cross section. We provide an analytic model of the heat input during HeII reionization and its effects on the temperature-density relation.