Full-Data Results of Hubble Frontier Fields: UV Luminosity Functions at $z\sim6-10$ and a Consistent Picture of Cosmic Reionization

Abstract

We present UV luminosity functions of dropout galaxies at $z\sim6-10$ with the complete Hubble Frontier Fields data. We obtain a catalog of $\sim450$ dropout-galaxy candidates (350, 66, and 40 at $z\sim6-7$, 8, and 9, respectively), whose UV absolute magnitudes reach $\sim-14$ mag, $\sim2$ mag deeper than the Hubble Ultra Deep Field detection limits. We carefully evaluate number densities of the dropout galaxies by Monte-Carlo simulations, including all lensing effects such as magnification, distortion, and multiplication of images as well as detection completeness and contamination effects in a self-consistent manner. We find that UV luminosity functions at $z\sim6-8$ have steep faint-end slopes, $α\sim-2$, and likely steeper slopes, $α\lesssim-2$ at $z\sim9-10$. We also find that the evolution of UV luminosity densities shows a non-accelerated decline beyond $z\sim8$ in the case of $M_\mathrm{trunc}=-15$, while an accelerated in the case of $M_\mathrm{trunc}=-17$. We examine whether our results are consistent with the Thomson scattering optical depth from the Planck satellite and the ionized hydrogen fraction $Q_\mathrm{HII}$ at $z\lesssim7$ based on the standard analytic reionization model. We find that there exist reionizaiton scenarios that consistently explain all the observational measurements with the allowed parameters of $f_{\rm esc}=0.17^{+0.07}_{-0.03}$ and $M_\mathrm{trunc}>-14.0$ for $\logξ_\mathrm{ion}/[\mathrm{erg}^{-1}\ \mathrm{Hz}]=25.34$, where $f_{\rm esc}$ is the escape fraction, $M_\mathrm{trunc}$ is the faint limit of the UV luminosity function, and $ξ_\mathrm{ion}$ is the conversion factor of the UV luminosity to the ionizing photon emission rate. The length of the reionization period is estimated to be $Δz=3.9^{+2.0}_{-1.6}$ (for $0.1<Q_\mathrm{HII}<0.99$), consistent with the recent estimate from Planck.