Tracing early structure formation with massive starburst galaxies and their implications for reionization

We also estimate the LF of Lyman-α emitters (LAEs) at z = 6 by relating the star formation rate in the simulation to the Lyα luminosity. We find that the simulated LAE LFs agree with the observed data provided that the net escape fraction of Lyα photon is fLyα ⩽ 0.1. We investigate two possible scenarios for this effect: (1) all sources in the simulation are uniformly dimmer by a factor of 10 through attenuation, and (2) one out of 10 LAEs randomly lights up at a given moment. We show that the correlation strength of the LAE spatial distribution can possibly distinguish the two scenarios.