• DOI:10.1093/mnras/stab2148
• Corpus ID: 231719354

Introducing SPHINX-MHD: the impact of primordial magnetic fields on the first galaxies, reionization, and the global 21-cm signal

@inproceedings{Katz2021IntroducingST,
  title={Introducing SPHINX-MHD: the impact of primordial magnetic fields on the first galaxies, reionization, and the global 21-cm signal},
  author={Harley Katz and Sergio Martin-Alvarez and Joakim Rosdahl and Taysun Kimm and J{\'e}r{\'e}my Blaizot and Martin G. Haehnelt and L'eo Michel-Dansac and Thibault Garel and Jos{\'e} O{\~n}orbe and Julien Devriendt and Adrianne D. Slyz and Omar Attia and R. Teyssier},
  year={2021}
}

• H. Katz, S. Martin-Alvarez, +10 authors R. Teyssier
• Published 27 January 2021
• Physics

We present the first results from SPHINX-MHD, a suite of cosmological radiation-magnetohydrodynamics simulations designed to study the impact of primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) on galaxy formation and the evolution of the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization. The simulations are among the first to employ multi-frequency, on-the-fly radiation transfer and constrained transport ideal MHD in a cosmological context to simultaneously model the inhomogeneous process of reionization as well as the growth of primordial magnetic fields. We run a series of (5 cMpc)3 cosmological volumes, varying both the strength of the seed magnetic field and its spectral index. We find that PMFs with a spectral index (nB) and a comoving amplitude (B0) that have nB > −0.562 log10 ( B0 1nG ) − 3.35 produce electron optical depths (τe) that are inconsistent with CMB constraints due to the unrealistically early collapse of low-mass dwarf galaxies. For nB ≥ −2.9, our constraints are considerably tighter than the ∼ nG constraints from Planck. PMFs that do not satisfy our constraints have little impact on the reionization history or the shape of the UV luminosity function. Likewise, detecting changes in the Lyα forest due to PMFs will be challenging because photoionisation and photoheating efficiently smooth the density field. However, we find that the first absorption feature in the global 21cm signal is a particularly sensitive indicator of the properties of the PMFs, even for those that satisfy our τe constraint. Furthermore, strong PMFs can marginally increase the escape of LyC photons by up to 25% and shrink the effective radii of galaxies by ∼ 44% which could increase the completeness fraction of galaxy surveys. Finally, our simulations show that surveys with a magnitude limit ofM UV,1500Å = −13 can probe the sources that provide the majority of photons for reionization out to z = 12.