Do Minihalos Affect Cosmic Reionization?

Abstract

Abstract The role of unresolved structures (“minihalos”) in determining the consumption of ionizing photons during cosmic reionization remains an unsolved problem in modeling cosmic reionization, despite recent extensive studies with small-box high-resolution simulations by Park et al. and Chan et al., because the small-box studies are not able to fully sample all environments. In this paper these simulations are combined with large-box simulations from the “Cosmic Reionization On Computers” (CROC) project, allowing one to account for the full range of environments and to produce an estimate for the number of recombinations per hydrogen atom that are missed in large-scale simulations like CROC or Thesan. I find that recombinations in unresolved minihalos are unimportant compared to recombinations produced in large-scale cosmic structures and inside more massive, fully resolved halos. Since both the Park et al. and Chan et al. studies have severe limitations, the conclusions of this paper may need to be verified with more representative sets of small-box high-resolution simulations.