| The Scattering of Lyman-series Photons in the Intergalactic Medium (2006) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| We re-examine scattering of photons near the Lyman-alpha resonance in the intergalactic medium (IGM). We first derive a general integral solution for the radiation field around resonance when spin diffusivity is ignored. Our solution shows explicitly that recoil sources an absorption feature, whose magnitude increases with the relative importance of recoil compared to Doppler broadening. This spectrum depends on the Lyman-alpha line profile, but approximating it with the absorption profile appropriate to the Lorentzian wings of natural broadening accurately reproduces the results for a full Voigt profile so long as T. Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS | |||||||||
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