Speaker
Description
The intergalactic medium damping wing signatures of the highest redshift quasars have been an effective tool in deciphering the epoch of reionization. However, only a handful have been discovered so far above redshift 7. In the near future, the Euclid mission will enable the discovery of an order of magnitude more quasars for damping wing studies. In light of this impending flood of new quasars, it is worth examining whether they can teach us more about reionization than just its history. That is, the topology of reionization should influence the shape and sightline-to-sightline variations of the quasar-damping wing signal. In our work, we have studied how the astrophysical parameters that govern the reionization topology affect the statistics of damping wings. We use 21cmFAST to generate a suite of patchy reionization models in large cosmological volumes across a wide range of astrophysical models for the sources of ionizing photons and compute the mean and scatter of the expected damping wing signal. We examine the interplay between the neutral fraction, quasar lifetime, quasar host halo mass, and source parameters that affect the reionization topology such as the minimum dark matter halo mass that supports star formation. Furthermore, we systematically explore the convergence properties of damping wing signals across diverse source models and multiple simulation volumes. We present a suite of models to assess both the ability of future quasar samples to constrain astrophysical model parameters and the additional systematic uncertainty on the neutral fraction incurred when they are fixed to a single fiducial value. We will make the suite of large-volume simulation boxes and damping wing spectra publicly available.
