The thermal history of the intergalactic medium at 3.9 ≤ z ≤ 4.3

Abstract

Abstract A new determination of the temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM) over $3.9 \leq z \leq 4.3$ is presented. We applied the curvature method on a sample of 10 high-resolution quasar spectra from the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph on the VLT/ESO. We measured the temperature at mean density by determining the temperature at the characteristic overdensity, which is tight function of the absolute curvature irrespective of $\unicode{x03B3}$ . Under the assumption of fiducial value of $\unicode{x03B3} = 1.4$ , we determined the values of temperatures at mean density $T_{0} = 7893^{+1417}_{-1226}$ K and $T_{0} = 8153^{+1224}_{-993}$ K for redshift range of $3.9 \leq z \leq 4.1$ and $4.1 \leq z \leq 4.3$ , respectively. Even though the results show no strong temperature evolution over the studied redshift range, our measurements are consistent with an IGM thermal history that includes a contribution from He ii reionisation.