Exploring the influence of reionisation-era galaxies on their local intergalactic medium using the Sherwood-Relics simulations

Abstract

Recent surveys have detected excess flux in the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest of quasar spectra several Mpc from high-redshift line-emitting galaxies, indicating a correlation between intergalactic medium (IGM) transmission and reionisation-era galaxies. We examine the galaxy-IGM connection using the Sherwood-Relics simulation suite, a set of hybrid radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that model the IGM at high redshift. We simulate the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and a population of mock [OIII] emitters using the survey specifications of JWST's ASPIRE programme. We measure the evolution of the effective optical depth in regions close to galaxies, and contrast this with a control sample probing the random IGM. We characterise the changing physical properties of the IGM to explain the observed sightline-to-sightline scatter in opacity between 5.4<$z$<6.2. We find that the IGM is more opaque than average at small radii ($r$ $\leq$ 5 cMpc/$h$) close to galaxies, as these regions are overdense. At larger radii (15<$r$ $\leq$ 50 cMpc/$h$), the IGM is more ionised than average, due to the higher photoionisation rate near galaxies. We find qualitative agreement with the observational results from ASPIRE, though we see large realisation-to-realisation scatter driven by cosmic variance, as also seen in theoretical explorations of the galaxy-Ly$\alpha$ transmission cross-correlation function. Our results generally agree with observations claiming that there is a large-scale ionisation bias around [OIII] emitters, supporting the idea that their role is significant in shaping the properties of the IGM during reionisation.