Bibcode
Duffy, Alan R.; Kay, Scott T.; Battye, Richard A.; Booth, C. M.; Dalla Vecchia, C.; Schaye, Joop
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 420, Issue 4, pp. 2799-2818.
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3
2012
Citations
66
Refereed citations
63
Description
The characterization of the atomic and molecular hydrogen content of
high-redshift galaxies is a major observational challenge that will be
addressed over the coming years with a new generation of radio
telescopes. We investigate this important issue by considering the
states of hydrogen across a range of structures within high-resolution
cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. In addition, our simulations
allow us to investigate the sensitivity of our results to numerical
resolution and to sub-grid baryonic physics (especially feedback from
supernovae and active galactic nuclei). We find that the most
significant uncertainty in modelling the neutral hydrogen distribution
arises from our need to model a self-shielding correction in moderate
density regions. Future simulations incorporating radiative transfer
schemes will be vital to improve on our empirical self-shielding
threshold. Irrespective of the exact nature of the threshold, we find
that while the atomic hydrogen mass function evolves only mildly from
redshift two to zero, the molecular hydrogen mass function increases
with increasing redshift, especially at the high-mass end.
Interestingly, the weak evolution of the neutral hydrogen mass function
is insensitive to the feedback scheme utilized, but the opposite is true
for the molecular gas, which is more closely associated with the star
formation in the simulations.