The Cosmic near Infrared Background Ii: Fluctuations

The Near Infrared Background (NIRB) is one of a few methods that can be used to observe the redshifted light from early stars at a redshift of six and above, and thus it is imperative to understand the significance of any detection or nondetection of the NIRB. Fluctuations of the NIRB can provide information on the first structures, such as halos and their surrounding ionized regions in the Inter Galactic Medium (IGM). We combine, for the first time, N -body simulations, radiative transfer code, and analytic calculations of luminosity of early structures to predict the angular power spectrum (Cl) of fluctuations in the NIRB. We study, in detail, the effects of various assumptions about the stellar mass, the initial mass spectrum of stars, metallicity, the star formation efficiency (f∗), the escape fraction of ionizing photons (fesc), and the star formation timescale (tSF), on the amplitude as well as the shape of Cl. The power spectrum of NIRB fluctuations is maximized when f∗ is the largest (as Cl ∝ f 2 ∗ ) and fesc is the smallest (as more nebular emission is produced within halos). A significant uncertainty in the predicted amplitude of Cl exists due to our lack of knowledge of tSF of these early populations of galaxies, which is equivalent to our lack of knowledge of the mass-to-light ratio of these sources. We do not see a turnover in the NIRB angular power spectrum of the halo contribution, which was claimed to exist in the literature, and explain this as the effect of high levels of non-linear bias that was ignored in the previous calculations. This is partly due to our choice of the