Simulating Cosmic Reionization and the Radiation Backgrounds from the Epoch of Reionization

TL;DR

This paper presents large-scale simulations of cosmic reionization combining cosmological N-body and radiative transfer models to predict signatures in cosmic backgrounds, aiming to understand galaxy contributions during reionization.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive simulation framework that integrates N-body and radiative transfer calculations to study reionization signatures and galaxy contributions.

Findings

Predicted effects on CMB, near-IR, and 21cm backgrounds.

Assessed the potential to distinguish galaxy mass contributions.

Progress in modeling the reionization process.

Abstract

Large-scale reionization simulations are described which combine the results of cosmological N-body simulations that model the evolving density and velocity fields and identify the galactic halo sources, with ray-tracing radiative transfer calculations which model the nonequilibrium ionization of the intergalactic medium. These simulations have been used to predict some of the signature effects of reionization on cosmic radiation backgrounds, including the CMB, near-IR, and redshifted 21cm backgrounds. We summarize some of our recent progress in this work, and address the question of whether observations of such signature effects can be used to distinguish the relative contributions of galaxies of different masses to reionization.