Can the intergalactic medium cause a rapid drop in Lyα emission at z> 6?

The large cross-section of the Lyα line makes it a sensitive probe of the ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM). Here we present the most complete study to date of the IGM Lyα opacity, and its application to the redshift evolution of the ’Lyα fraction’, i.e. the fraction of color-selected galaxies with a detectable Lyα emission line. We use a tiered approach, which combines large-scale semi-numeric simulations of reionization with moderate-scale hydrodynamic simulations of the ionized IGM. This allows us to simultaneously account for evolution in both: (i) the opacity from an incomplete (patchy) reionization, parameterized by the filling factor of ionized regions,QHII; and (ii) the opacity from self-shielded systems in the ionized IGM, parameterized by the average photo-ionization rate inside HII regions, 〈Γ12〉HII. In contrast to recent empirical models, attenuation from patchy reionization has a unimodal distribution along different sightlines, while attenuation from self-shielded systems is more bimodal. We quantify the average IGM transmission in our (QHII, 〈Γ12〉HII) parameter space, which can easily be used to interpret new data sets. Using current observations, we predict that the Lyα fraction cannot drop by more than a factor of ≈ 2 with IGM attenuation alone, eve