Probing the Dark Ages with Metal Absorption Lines
Recent observations of high redshift quasars at z~6 have finally revealed complete Gunn-Peterson absorption. However, this at best constrains the volume-weighted and mass-weighted hydrogen neutral fractions to be greater than 10^-3 and 10^-2 respectively; stronger constraints are not possible due to the high optical depth for hydrogen Lyman transitions. Here I suggest certain metal lines as tracers of the hydrogen neutral fraction. These lines should cause unsaturated absorption when the IGM is almost fully neutral, if it is polluted to metallicities Z ~ 10^-3.5--10^-2.5 Z_solar. Such a minimal level of metal pollution is inevitable in the middle to late stages of reionization unless quasars rather than stars are the dominant source of ionizing photons. The OI line at 1302 Angstroms is particularly promising: the OI and H ionization potentials are almost identical, and OI should be in very tight charge exchange equilibrium with H. The SiII 1260 Angstrom transition might also be observable. At high redshift, overdense regions are the first to be polluted to high metallicity but the last to remain permanently ionized, due to the short recombination times. Such regions should produce a fluctuating OI and SiII forest which, if observed, would indicate large quantities of neutral hydrogen. The OI forest may already be detectable in the SDSS z=6.28 quasar. If seen in future high-redshift quasars, the OI and SiII forests will probe the topology of reionization and metal pollution in the early universe. If in additional the HI optical depth can be measured from the damping wing of a high-redshift gamma-ray burst, they will yield a very robust measure of the metallicity of the high-redshift universe.