Constraining the Contribution of Galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei to Cosmic Reionization

TL;DR

This paper develops a model of cosmic reionization including high-redshift galaxies and AGNs, analyzing their contributions and comparing with observations to constrain their roles and properties.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, realistic model of cosmic reionization that varies key parameters and incorporates AGN spectral energy distributions, providing new constraints on source contributions.

Findings

High-z galaxy escape fraction $f_{esc} < 0.15$ is favored.

AGN faint-end slope $eta_{hz} > -1.5$ is supported by data.

Both galaxy-dominated and AGN-dominated reionization scenarios remain plausible.

Abstract

Understanding the detailed process of cosmic reionization is one of the remaining problems in astrophysics and cosmology. Here we construct a model of cosmic reionization that includes contribution from high-$z$ galaxies and active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and calculate the reionization and thermal histories with the model. To keep the model to be general and realistic, we vary the escape fraction of ionizing photons, $f_{\rm esc}$, and the faint-end slope of the AGN luminosity function at high redshifts, $\alpha_{\rm hz}$, within the constraints from the observed cosmic star formation history and the observed bright-end UV luminosity functions at $z \leq 6$. Additionally, we model the spectral energy distribution (SED) of AGNs which depends on the Eddington ratio and the black-hole mass. By comparing the computed reionization histories with the observed \ion{H}{i} fractions and the optical depth for Thomson scattering from Planck, we find that $\alpha_{\rm hz} > -1.5$ and $f_{\rm esc} < 0.15$ are favored when we employ the bright-end luminosity function obtained by Giallongo et al. Our result suggests that an AGN-dominated model with the abundance of faint-AGNs being as large as the estimate by Giallongo et al. is allowed only if the contribution from high-z galaxies is almost negligible, while a galaxy-dominant model is also allowed. We also find that the shape of SED has a significant impact on the thermal history. Therefore it is expected that measurements of the thermal state of the IGM provide useful information on properties of ionizing sources.