Reionization in the Warm Dark Matter Model

Abstract

Compared with the cold dark matter (CDM) model, in the warm dark matter (WDM) model formation of small scale structure is suppressed. It is often thought that this would delay the reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM), as the star formation rate during the epoch of reionization (EOR) would be lowered. However, during the later stage of the EOR, a large portion of the ionizing photons are consumed by recombination inside the minihalos, where the gas has higher density and recombination rates than the gas in the IGM. The suppression of small scale structure would therefore reduce the recombination rate, and could potentially shorten the reionization process. This effect is investigated here by using the analytical "bubble model" of reionization. We find that in some cases, though the initiation of the EOR is delayed in the WDM model, its completion could be even earlier than the CDM case, but the effect is generally small. We obtain limits on the WDM particles mass for different reionization redshifts.