Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

"Computing Reionization with the Moments of the Transfer Equation: First Results on Topology"

Advances in algorithms and computing speed have recently rendered
3-dimensional radiative transfer calculations of cosmological reionization
computationally feasible. Simulations are now uncovering a rich
phenomenology of processes that occur over a wide range of spatial and
temporal scales and that are difficult to study analytically. I present a
new, accurate moment method for computing cosmological reionization and
discuss first results regarding the topology of reionization and its
implications for the ionizing photon budget.