Lyman-Werner UV escape fractions from primordial haloes

Abstract

Population III (Pop III) stars can regulate star formation in the primordial Universe in several ways. They can ionize nearby haloes, and even if their ionizing photons are trapped by their own haloes, their Lyman-Werner (LW) photons can still escape and destroy H2 in other haloes, preventing them from cooling and forming stars. LWescape fractions are thus a key parameter in cosmological simulations of early reionization and star formation but have not yet been parametrized for realistic haloes by halo or stellar mass. To do so, we perform radiation hydrodynamical simulations of LW UV escape from 9-120M⊙ Pop III stars in 105-107 M⊙ haloes with ZEUS-MP.We find that photons in the LWlines (i.e. those responsible for destroying H2 in nearby systems) have escape fractions ranging from 0 to 85 per cent. No LW photons escape the most massive halo in our sample, even from the most massive star. Escape fractions for photons elsewhere in the 11.18-13.6 eV energy range, which can be redshifted into the LWlines at cosmological distances, are generally much higher, being above 60 per cent for all but the least massive stars in the most massive haloes. We find that shielding of H2 by neutral hydrogen, which has been neglected in most studies to date, produces escape fractions that are up to a factor of 3 smaller than those predicted by H2 self-shielding alone.