The forest at EndEoR: The effect of Lyman Limit Systems on the End of Reionisation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small-scale Lyman limit systems influence the final stages of cosmic reionisation, comparing different modeling approaches to match observational data and recommending a dynamic LLS model for accurate large-scale simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a redshift- and position-dependent LLS model that best reproduces observational constraints during the EndEoR, improving large-scale reionisation simulations.

Findings

Only the dynamic LLS model matches all observational probes.

Simpler models are less accurate but may suffice for certain goals.

The study highlights the importance of small-scale absorbers in reionisation modeling.

Abstract

The final stages of cosmic reionisation (EndEoR) are expected to be strongly regulated by the residual neutral hydrogen in the already ionised regions of the Universe. Its presence limits the mean distance that ionising photons can travel and hence, the extent of the regions that sources of ionising photons can affect. The structures containing most of this residual neutral hydrogen are typically unresolved in large-scale simulations of reionisation. Here, we investigate and compare a range of approaches for including the effect of these small-scale absorbers, also known as Lyman limit systems (LLS), in such simulations. We evaluate the impact of these different approaches on the reionisation history, the evolution of the ultraviolet background, and its fluctuations. We also compare to observational results on the distribution of Lyman-$\alpha$ opacity towards the EndEoR and the measured mean free path of ionising photons. We further consider their effect on the 21-cm power spectrum. We find that although each of the different approaches can match some of the observed probes of the final stages of reionisation, only the use of a redshift-dependent and position-dependent LLS model is able to reproduce all of them. We therefore recommend that large-scale reionisation simulations, which aim to describe both the state of the ionised and neutral intergalactic medium use such an approach, although the other, simpler approaches are applicable depending on the science goal of the simulation.