1 research outputs found
Simulating Reionization in Numerical Cosmology
The incorporation of radiative transfer effects into cosmological
hydrodynamical simulations is essential for understanding how the intergalactic
medium (IGM) makes the transition from a neutral medium to one that is almost
fully ionized. Here, we present an approximate numerical method designed to
study in a statistical sense how a cosmological density field is ionized by a
set of discrete point sources. A diffuse background radiation field is also
computed self-consistently in our procedure. The method requires relatively few
time steps and can be employed with simulations having high resolution. We
describe the details of the algorithm and provide a description of how the
method can be applied to the output from a pre-existing cosmological simulation
to study the systematic reionization of a particular ionic species. As a first
application, we compute the reionization of He II by quasars in the redshift
range 3 to 6.Comment: 37 pages, 7 figures, Submitted to New