Probing the Neutral Fraction of the IGM with GRBs during the Epoch of Reionization

Details Probing the Neutral Fraction of the IGM with GRBs during the Epoch of Reionization Probing the Neutral Fraction of the IGM with GRBs during the Epoch of Reionization

2007-10-04

arxiv.org/abs/0710.1018v2

Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.388: 1101-1110, 2008

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

10 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS

Scientific paper

10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13271.x

We show that near-infrared observations of the red side of the Ly-alpha line from a single gamma ray burst (GRB) afterglow cannot be used to constrain the global neutral fraction of the intergalactic medium (IGM), x_H, at the GRB's redshift to better than ~0.3. Some GRB sight-lines will encounter more neutral hydrogen than others at fixed x_H owing to the patchiness of reionisation. GRBs during the epoch of reionization will often bear no discernible signature of a neutral IGM in their afterglow spectra. We discuss the constraints on x_H from the z = 6.3 burst, GRB050904, and quantify the probability of detecting a neutral IGM using future spectroscopic observations of high-redshift, near-infrared GRB afterglows. Assuming an observation with signal-to-noise similar to the Subaru FOCAS spectrum of GRB050904 and that the column density distribution of damped Ly-alpha absorbers is the same as measured at lower redshifts, a GRB from an epoch when x_H = 0.5 can be used to detect a partly neutral IGM at 98% confidence level 10% of the time (and, for an observation with three times the sensitivity, 30% of the time).

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