Gas Clumping in Self-Consistent Reionisation Models

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced cosmological simulations to study how galactic outflows and photoionisation heating influence the recombination rate and clumping factor of the intergalactic medium during reionisation, aligning models with observations.

Contribution

It presents the first self-consistent simulations of photon-starved reionisation that match multiple observational constraints and analyze the effects of heating and outflows on IGM clumping.

Findings

Ionising background reduces clumping factor by over 50%.

Photoionisation heating suppresses recombinations, raising the clumping factor from <1 to 3.3 at z=6.

Incorporating temperature- and ionisation-corrected clumping factors reproduces observed optical depth within 10%.

Abstract

We use a suite of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations including a self-consistent treatment for inhomogeneous reionisation to study the impact of galactic outflows and photoionisation heating on the volume-averaged recombination rate of the intergalactic medium (IGM). By incorporating an evolving ionising escape fraction and a treatment for self-shielding within Lyman limit systems, we have run the first simulations of "photon-starved" reionisation scenarios that simultaneously reproduce observations of the abundance of galaxies, the optical depth to electron scattering of cosmic microwave background photons \tau, and the effective optical depth to Lyman\alpha absorption at z=5. We confirm that an ionising background reduces the clumping factor C by more than 50% by smoothing moderately-overdense (\Delta=1--100) regions. Meanwhile, outflows increase clumping only modestly. The clumping factor of ionised gas is much lower than the overall baryonic clumping factor because the most overdense gas is self-shielded. Photoionisation heating further suppresses recombinations if reionisation heats gas above the canonical 10,000 K. Accounting for both effects within our most realistic simulation, C rises from <1 at z>10 to 3.3 at z=6. We show that incorporating temperature- and ionisation-corrected clumping factors into an analytical reionisation model reproduces the numerical simulation's \tau to within 10%. Finally, we explore how many ionising photons are absorbed during the process of heating filaments by considering the overall photon cost of reionisation in analytical models that assume that the IGM is heated at different redshifts. For reionisation redshifts of 9--10, cold filaments boost the reionisation photon budget by ~1 photon per hydrogen atom.