The short ionizing photon mean free path at z=6 in Cosmic Dawn III, a new fully-coupled radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of the Epoch of Reionization - Archive ouverte HAL Access content directly
Journal Articles Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Year : 2022

## The short ionizing photon mean free path at z=6 in Cosmic Dawn III, a new fully-coupled radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of the Epoch of Reionization

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Joseph S. W. Lewis
• Function : Author
Pierre Ocvirk
• Function : Author
Jenny G. Sorce
• Function : Author
• PersonId : 1218626
• IdHAL : jennygsorce
Yohan Dubois
• Function : Author
Dominique Aubert
• Function : Author
Luke Conaboy
• Function : Author
Paul R. Shapiro
• Function : Author
Taha Dawoodbhoy
• Function : Author
Romain Teyssier
• Function : Author
Gustavo Yepes
• Function : Author
Stefan Gottlöber
• Function : Author
Yann Rasera
• Function : Author
Kyungjin Ahn
• Function : Author
Ilian T. Iliev
• Function : Author
Hyunbae Park
• Function : Author
Émilie Thélie
• Function : Author

#### Abstract

Recent determinations of the mean free path of ionising photons (mfp) in the intergalactic medium (IGM) at $\rm z=6$ are lower than many theoretical predictions. In order to gain insight, we investigate the evolution of the mfp in our new massive fully coupled radiation hydrodynamics cosmological simulation of reionization: Cosmic Dawn III (CoDa III). CoDa III's scale ($\rm 94^3 \, cMpc^3$) and resolution ($\rm 8192^3$ grid) make it particularly suitable to study the IGM during reionization. The simulation was performed with RAMSES-CUDATON on Summit, and used 131072 processors coupled to 24576 GPUs, making it the largest reionization simulation, and largest ever RAMSES simulation. A superior agreement with global constraints on reionization is obtained in CoDa III over CoDa II, especially for the evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction and the cosmic photo-ionization rate, thanks to an improved calibration, later end of reionization ($\rm z=5.6$), and higher spatial resolution. Analyzing the mfp, we find that CoDa III reproduces the most recent observations very well, from $\rm z=6$ to $\rm z=4.6$. We show that the distribution of the mfp in CoDa III is bimodal, with short (neutral) and long (ionized) mfp modes, due to the patchiness of reionization and the co-existence of neutral versus ionized regions during reionization. The neutral mode peaks at sub-kpc to kpc scales of mfp, while the ionized mode peak evolves from $\rm 0.1 Mpc/h$ at $\rm z=7$ to ~10 Mpc/h at $\rm z=5.2$. Computing the mfp as the average of the ionized mode provides the best match to the recent observational determinations. The distribution reduces to a single neutral (ionized) mode at $\rm z>13$ ($\rm z<5$).

#### Domains

Sciences of the Universe [physics]

### Dates and versions

insu-03763116 , version 1 (29-08-2022)

### Identifiers

• HAL Id : insu-03763116 , version 1
• ARXIV :
• BIBCODE :
• DOI :

### Cite

Joseph S. W. Lewis, Pierre Ocvirk, Jenny G. Sorce, Yohan Dubois, Dominique Aubert, et al.. The short ionizing photon mean free path at z=6 in Cosmic Dawn III, a new fully-coupled radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of the Epoch of Reionization. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022, ⟨10.1093/mnras/stac2383⟩. ⟨insu-03763116⟩

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