Evolution of Neutral Oxygen During the Epoch of Reionization and its Use in Estimating the Neutral Hydrogen Fraction

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to analyze how neutral oxygen absorbers evolve during reionization and how they can be used to estimate the neutral hydrogen fraction, revealing insights into the ionization history of the universe.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using synthetic sightlines to connect OI absorber statistics with the progress of hydrogen reionization, improving understanding of the epoch.

Findings

OI covering fraction decreases with reionization

OI absorber incidence drops sharply at overlap epoch

Simulations underproduce strong absorbers compared to observations

Abstract

We use synthetic sightlines drawn through snapshots of the Technicolor Dawn simulations to explore how the statistics of neutral oxygen OI absorbers respond to hydrogen reionization. The ionization state of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) initially roughly tracks that of the intergalactic medium, but beginning at $z=8$ the CGM grows systematically more neutral owing to self-shielding. Weak absorbers trace diffuse gas that lies farther from halos, hence they are ionized first, whereas stronger systems are less sensitive to reionization. The overall OI covering fraction decreases slowly with time owing to competition between ongoing enrichment and gradual encroachment of ionization fronts into increasingly overdense gas. While the declining covering fraction is partially offset by continued formation of new halos, the ionization of the diffuse gas causes the predicted line-of-sight incidence rate of OI absorbers to decline abruptly at the overlap epoch, in qualitative agreement with observations. In comparison to the recently-observed equivalent width (EW) distribution at $z\approx6$, the simulations underproduce systems with $EW \geq 0.1 \unicode{x212B}$, although they reproduce weaker systems with $EW \geq 0.05 \unicode{x212B}$. By $z\approx5$, the incidence of $EW < 0.1 \unicode{x212B}$ systems are overproduced, consistent with previous indications that the simulated ionizing background is too weak at $z<6$. The summed column densities of SiII and SiIV trace the total oxygen column, and hence the ratio of the OI and SiII + SiIV comoving mass densities traces the progress of reionization. This probe may prove particularly useful in the regime where $x_{HI} > 10\%$