Lyman-alpha as a proxy for ionizing photon escape

How ionizing photons escaped the dense neutral hydrogen envelopes of galaxies to reionize the Universe is unknown. This project aims to investiate the issue using Lyman-alpha radiative transfer simulations and a comparison with data.

We know that the Universe turned from neutral to ionized in the so-called ‘Epoch of Reionization’. However, we do not know yet how the photons that were responsible for this era escaped their host-galaxies as they can be absorbed by gas already inside the galaxies. Luckily for astrophysics, Lyman-alpha photons are susceptible to the same gas as ionizing photons. In this project, you will run your own radiative transfer simulations to figure out a link between the escape of ionizing and Lyman-alpha photons.

This is a numerical/theoretical thesis with connection to observations.