2001/05/10 by Aaron Sokasian, Tom Abel, Lars Hernquist +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s1384-1076(01)00065-3
37 pages, 7 figures, Submitted to NewA
arxiv created 2001/05/10 · openalex publication_date 2001/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.