Nick Battaglia CMU

Reionization on Large Scales: A New Parametric Model and CMB Observables

The epoch of reionization (EoR) marks the emergence of the first luminous sources: stars, galaxies, and quasars. These luminous sources convert the cold and neutral intergalactic medium into a warm and highly ionized one. We present a new method for modeling inhomogeneous reionization on large scales. Utilizing large-scale high-resolution radiative transfer hydrodynamic simulations of cosmological reionization we show that the density and redshift of reionizaton fields are highly correlated on large scales ( > 1Mpc/h) and can be easily modeled by a linear bias. Therefore, we are able to quickly construct a redshift of reionization field from any large-scale density field by simply filtering this density field. We present Cosmic Microwave Background observables from this model and illustrate the potential to constrain the mid-point and duration of EoR when combining these predictions with future observations.