Lyα radiative transfer in a multi-phase medium

Hydrogen Ly alpha is our primary emission-line window into high redshift galaxies. Surprisingly, despite an extensive literature, Lya radiative transfer in the most realistic case of a dusty, multi-phase medium has not received detailed theoretical attention. We investigate Lya resonant scattering through an ensemble of dusty, moving, optically thick gas clumps. We treat each clump as a scattering particle and use Monte-Carlo simulations of surface scattering to quantify continuum and Ly alpha surface scattering angles, absorption probabilities, and frequency redistribution, as a function of the gas dust content. This atomistic approach speeds up the simulations by many orders of magnitude, making possible calculations which are otherwise intractable. Our fitting formulae can be readily adapted for fast radiative transfer in numerical simulations. With these surface scattering results, we develop an analytic framework for estimating escape fractions and line widths as a function of gas geometry, motion, and dust content. Our simple analytic model shows good agreement with full Monte-Carlo simulations. We show that the key geometric parameter is the average number of surface scatters for escape in the absence of absorption, N-0, and we provide fitting formulae for several geometries of astrophysical interest. We consider two interesting applications: (i) Equivalent widths. Ly alpha can preferentially escape from a dusty multi-phase ISM if most of the dust lies in cold neutral clouds, which Ly alpha photons cannot penetrate. This might explain the anomalously high EWs sometimes seen in high-redshift/submm sources. (ii) Multi-phase galactic outflows. We show the characteristic profile is asymmetric with a broad red tail, and relate the profile features to the outflow speed and gas geometry. Many future applications are envisaged. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.