High Precision Analyses of Lyman alpha Damping Wing of Gamma-Ray Bursts
  in the Reionization Era: On the Controversial Results from GRB 130606A at z =
  5.91
  The unprecedentedly bright afterglow of Swift GRB 130606A at z = 5.91 gave us
a unique opportunity to probe the reionization era by high precision analyses
of the redward damping wing of Ly alpha absorption, but the reported
constraints on the neutral hydrogen fraction (f_HI) in intergalactic medium
(IGM) derived from spectra taken by different telescopes are in contradiction.
Here we examine the origin of this discrepancy by analyzing the spectrum taken
by VLT with our own analysis code previously used to fit the Subaru spectrum.
Though the VLT team reported no evidence for IGM HI using the VLT spectrum, we
confirmed our previous result of preferring non-zero IGM HI (the best-fit f_HI
~ 0.06, when IGM HI extends to the GRB redshift). The fit residuals of the VLT
spectrum by the model without IGM HI show the same systematic trend as the
Subaru spectrum. We consider that the likely origin of the discrepancy between
the two teams is the difference of the wavelength ranges adopted in the
fittings; our wavelength range is wider than that of the VLT team, and also we
avoided the shortest wavelength range of deep Ly alpha absorption (lambda_obs <
8426 A), because this region is dominated by HI in the host galaxy and the
systematic uncertainty about host HI velocity distribution is large. We also
study the sensitivity of these results to the adopted Ly alpha cross section
formulae, ranging from the classical Lorentzian function to the most recent one
taking into account fully quantum mechanical scattering. It is found that the
preference for non-zero IGM HI is robust against the choice of the cross
section formulae, but it is quantitatively not negligible and hence one should
be careful in future analyses.
