The cool side of Lyman Alpha Emitters
Pratika Dayal, Andrea Ferrara, Alexandro Saro

TL;DR
This study enhances simulations of Lyman Alpha Emitters by including HI cooling and dust evolution, revealing their impact on luminosities, escape fractions, and matching observed luminosity functions across redshifts.
Contribution
It introduces a detailed galaxy-by-galaxy modeling of HI cooling and dust processes in LAEs, improving the understanding of their luminosity and escape fraction evolution.
Findings
HI cooling contributes 16-18% of Lyman Alpha radiation
Dust content scales with stellar mass and metallicity
Model reproduces observed luminosity functions and equivalent width scatter
Abstract
We extend a previous study of Lyman Alpha Emitters (LAEs) based on hydrodynamical cosmological simulations, by including two physical processes important for LAEs: (a) Lyman Alpha and continuum luminosities produced by cooling of collisionally excited HI in the galaxy, (b) dust formation and evolution; we follow these processes on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis. HI cooling on average contributes 16-18% of the Lyman Alpha radiation produced by stars, but this value can be much higher in low mass LAEs and further increased if the HI is clumpy. The continuum luminosity is instead almost completely dominated by stellar sources. The dust content of galaxies scales with their stellar mass, M_{dust} is proportional to M_*^0.7 and stellar metallicity, Z_*, such that M_{dust} is proportional to Z_*^1.7. As a result, the massive galaxies have Lyman Alpha escape fraction as low as f_alpha=0.1, with a…
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