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Abstract

Epoch of Reionization revealed by the HII regions of the Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars

Ting-Yi Lu (NTHU), Tomotsugu Goto (NTHU), Yoshiki Matsuoka (Ehime U.), Tohru Nagao (Ehime U.), and the SHELLQs collaboration

A major goals in cosmology is to reveal the ionization history of the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization (EoR). Because the IGM ionization history during the EoR, 5<z<20, is strongly linked to the physical peoperties of the first stars and galaxies, and the structure formation history. The Lya absorptions of neutral Hydrogen in the IGM imprint on the UV continua of z>6 quasars is one of the most promising probes of the IGM ionization state at high-z universe. In this work we thus study the EoR with half of the known z>6 quasars, the 93 quasars recently discoveried by the Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars project. We measure the redsift evoultion of the HII region sizes of these quasars because the size depends on the neutral fraction of IGM and the emissiviy of the quasar. We found that the HII region size decreases from z~6 to z~7, which implies a higer IGM neutral fraction at higher redshift. Besides, the IGM photoinization rate derived from the HII region size rise rapidly at z=6-7, which implies that the EoR ends at z~6 and is mainly driven by faint star forming galaxies rather than quasars.

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