XXIVth IAP Colloquium

Far away : light in the young universe at redshift beyond three

Monday July 7 to Friday July 11, 2008

CANTALUPO's Presentation

Precise if your presentation is oral or a poster : oral
Title of your presentation : Mapping HI during reionization with the Ly-alpha emission from QSO Ionization-fronts


Abstract
I will present a new method to directly map the HI distribution during the reionization epoch and to constrain the emission properties of the highest-redshift QSOs. As a tracer of HI, we propose to use the Ly-alpha radiation produced by collisional excitations inside the QSO ionization-fronts that expand in the IGM during reionization. Combining two radiative transfer models, we estimated the expected Ly-alpha signal for a large number of configurations where we varied both the properties of the ionizing QSO and of the surrounding medium. The expected signal should be already detectable with current facilities, shedding new light on the reionization history and on the properties of the high-z QSOs.


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