The distribution of neutral hydrogen around high-redshift galaxies and quasars in the EAGLE simulation

The observed high covering fractions of neutral hydrogen (H I) with column densities above similar to 10(17) cm(-2) around Lyman-Break Galaxies (LBGs) and bright quasars at redshifts z similar to 2-3 has been identified as a challenge for simulations of galaxy formation. We use the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environment (EAGLE) cosmological, hydrodynamical simulation, which has been shown to reproduce a wide range of galaxy properties and for which the subgrid feedback was calibrated without considering gas properties, to study the distribution of HI around high-redshift galaxies. We predict the covering fractions of strong HI absorbers (N-HI greater than or similar to 1017 cm(-2)) inside haloes to increase rapidly with redshift but to depend only weakly on halo mass. For massive (M-200 greater than or similar to 10(12) M-circle dot) haloes, the covering fraction profiles are nearly scale-invariant and we provide fitting functions that reproduce the simulation results. While efficient feedback is required to increase the HI covering fractions to the high observed values, the distribution of strong absorbers in and around haloes of a fixed mass is insensitive to factor of 2 variations in the strength of the stellar feedback. In contrast, at fixed stellar mass the predicted HI distribution is highly sensitive to the feedback efficiency. The fiducial EAGLE simulation reproduces both the observed global column density distribution function of HI and the observed radial covering fraction profiles of strong HI absorbers around LBGs and bright quasars.