Tirthankar Roy Choudhury

Lyman α emitters gone missing: evidence for late reionization?

We combine high resolution hydrodynamical simulations with an intermediate resolution, dark matter only simulation and an analytical model for the growth of ionized regions to estimate the large scale distribution and redshift evolution of the visibility of Lyα emission in 6<=z<=8 galaxies. The inhomogeneous distribution of neutral hydrogen during the reionization process results in significant fluctuations in the Lyα transmissivity on large scales. The transmissivity depends not only on the ionized fraction of the intergalactic medium by volume and the amplitude of the local ionizing background, but is also rather sensitive to the evolution of the relative velocity shift of the Lyα emission line due to resonant scattering. We reproduce a decline in the space density of Lyα emitting galaxies as rapid as observed with a rather rapidly evolving neutral fraction between z=6-8, and a typical Lyα line velocity offset of 100 km/s redward of systemic at z=6 which decreases toward higher redshift. The new (02/2015) Planck results indicate such a recent end to reionization is no longer disfavoured by constraints from the cosmic microwave background.

The redshift evolution of escape fraction of hydrogen ionizing photons from galaxies

Using our cosmological radiative transfer code, we study the implications of the updated QSO emissivity and star formation history for the escape fraction (f_esc) of hydrogen ionizing photons from galaxies. We estimate the f_esc that is required to reionize the Universe and to maintain the ionization state of the intergalactic medium in the post-reionization era. At z>5.5, we show that a constant f_esc of 0.14 to 0.22 is sufficient to reionize the Universe. At z 3 together with a nearly constant measured H I photoionization rates at 3 4. In addition, a simple extrapolation of the contribution of such QSOs to high-z suggests that QSOs alone can reionize the Universe. This implies, at z>3.5, that either the properties of galaxies should evolve rapidly to increase the f_esc or most of the low-mass galaxies should host massive black holes and sustain accretion over a prolonged period. These results motivate a careful investigation of theoretical predictions of these alternate scenarios that can be distinguished using future observations. Moreover, it is also very important to revisit the measurements of H I photoionization rates that are crucial to the analysis presented here.

Models of the cosmological 21 cm signal from the epoch of reionization calibrated with Ly α and CMB data

Support by ERC Advanced Grant 320596 ‘The Emergence of Structure During the Epoch of Reionization’ is gratefully acknowledged. EP gratefully acknowledges support by the Kavli Foundation. We acknowledge PRACE for awarding us access to the Curie supercomputer, based in France at the Tres Grand Centre de Calcul (TGCC). This work used the DiRAC Data Centric system at Durham University, operated by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). This equipment was funded by BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant ST/K00042X/1, STFC capital grants ST/H008519/1 and ST/K00087X/1, STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K003267/1, and Durham University. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure. This research was supported by the Munich Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics (MIAPP) of the DFG cluster of excellence ‘Origin and Structure of the Universe’.

First study of reionization in the Planck 2015 normalized closed ΛCDM inflation model

We study reionization in two non-flat

Warm dark matter constraints from high-z direct collapse black holes using the JWST

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Halo models of H i selected galaxies

CDM inflation models that best fit the Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background anisotropy observations, ignoring or in conjunction with baryon acoustic oscillation distance measurements. We implement a principal component analysis (PCA) to estimate the uncertainties in the reionization history from a joint quasar-CMB dataset. A thorough Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis is done over the parameter space of PCA modes for both non-flat

Probing the fluctuating ultraviolet background using the Hubble Frontier Fields

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Photon number conservation and the large-scale 21 cm power spectrum in seminumerical models of reionization

CDM inflation models as well as the original Planck 2016 tilted, spatially-flat

Intergalactic Lyman continuum photon budget in the past 5 billion years

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Reionization and Galaxy Formation in Warm Dark Matter Cosmologies

CDM inflation model. Although both flat and non-flat models can closely match the low-redshift (