In a semi-numerical model of reionization, the evolution of ionization fraction is approximately simulated by the criterion of ionizing photon to baryon ratio. We incorporate a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation based on the Millennium II N-body simulation into the semi-numerical modeling of reionization. The semianalytical model is used to predict the production of ionizing photons, then we use the semi-numerical method to model the reionization process. Such an approach allows more detailed modeling of the reionization, and also connects observations of galaxies at low and high redshifts to the reionization history. The galaxy formation model we use was designed to match the low-z observations, and it also fits the high redshift luminosity function reasonably well, but its prediction about star formation falls below the observed value, and we find that it also underpredicts the stellar ionizing photon production rate, hence the reionization cannot be completed at z ~ 6. We also consider simple modifications of the model with more top heavy initial mass functions, which can allow the reionization to occur at earlier epochs. The incorporation of the semi-analytical model may also affect the topology of the HI regions during the epoch of reionization, and the neutral regions produced by our simulations with the semi-analytical model, which appeared less poriferous than the simple halo-based models.
Jie ZhouQi GuoGao-Chao LiuBin YueYi-Dong XuXue-Lei Chen
We select a sample of quiescent luminous red galaxies （LRGs） from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 with a high signal-to-noise ratio （S/N） to study the consistency of fitting the full spectrum by using different packages, mainly, ULySS and STARLIGHT. The spectrum of each galaxy in the sample is fitted by the full spectrum fitting packages ULySS and STARLIGHT. We find： （1） for spec- tra with higher S/Ns, the ages of stellar populations obtained from ULySS are slightly older than those from STARLIGHT, and metallicities derived from ULySS are slightly richer than those from STARLIGHT. In general, both packages can give roughly con- sistent fitting results. （2） For low S/N spectra, it is possible that the fitting by ULySS can become trapped at some local minimum in the parameter space during execution and thus may give unreliable results, but STARLIGHT can still give reliable results. Based on the fitting results of LRGs, we further analyze their star formation history and the relation between their age and velocity dispersion, and find that they agree well with conclusions from previous works.
