The amplitude of fluctuations in the Ly-a forest on small spatial scales is sensitive to the temperature of the IGM and its spatial fluctuations. The temperature of the IGM and its spatial variations contain important information about hydrogen and helium reionization. We present a new measurement of the small-scale structure in the Ly-a forest from 40 high resolution, high signal-to-noise, VLT spectra at z=2.2-4.2. We convolve each Ly-a forest spectrum with a suitably chosen wavelet filter, which allows us to extract the amount of small-scale structure in the forest as a function of position across each spectrum. We compare these measurements with high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of the Ly-a forest which track more than 2 billion particles. This comparison suggests that the IGM temperature close to the cosmic mean density (T_0) peaks near z=3.4, at which point it is greater than 20,000 K at 2-sigma confidence. The temperature at lower redshift is consistent with the fall-off expected from adiabatic cooling ($T_0 \propto (1+z)^2$), after the peak temperature is reached near z=3.4. At z=4.2 our results favor a temperature of T_0 = 15-20,000 K. However, owing mostly to uncertainties in the mean transmitted flux at this redshift, a cooler IGM model with T_0 = 10,000 K is only disfavored at the 2-sigma level here, although such cool IGM models are strongly discrepant with the z ~ 3-3.4 measurement. We do not detect large spatial fluctuations in the IGM temperature at any redshift covered by our data set. The simplest interpretation of our measurements is that HeII reionization completes sometime near z ~ 3.4, although statistical uncertainties are still large [Abridged].
The Lyman-alpha forest is the large-scale structure probe for which we appear to have modeling control to the highest wavenumbers. This makes the Lyman-alpha forest of great interest for constraining the warmness/fuzziness of dark matter and the timing of reionization processes. However, the standard statistic, the Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum, is unable to strongly constrain the IGM temperature-density relation, and this inability further limits how well other high wavenumber-sensitive parameters can be constrained. With the aim of breaking these degeneracies, we measure the power spectr…
The Lyman-alpha forest is a unique probe of large-scale matter density fluctuations at high redshift (z > 2). It is possible to obtain 3D maps of the matter distribution from Lyman-alpha data, using tomographic reconstruction methods. Here, we present the largest tomographic map of matter fluctuations at z > 2, over the Gpc^3 volume covered by Lyman-alpha forest from SDSS-IV quasar spectra in the Stripe 82 field. We present a catalog of high-redshift voids constructed from this map. The measurement of the cross-correlation between these voids and the Lyman-alpha forest provides the first obser…
In this work we extend our recently developed multi-fidelity emulation technique to the simulated Lyman-$α$ forest flux power spectrum. Multi-fidelity emulation allows interpolation of simulation outputs between cosmological parameters using many cheap low-fidelity simulations and a few expensive high-fidelity simulations. Using a test suite of small box (30 Mpc/h) simulations, we show that multi-fidelity emulation is able to reproduce the Lyman-$α$ forest flux power spectrum well, achieving an average accuracy when compared to a test suite of $0.8\%$. We further show that it has a substantial…
We present new simulations of the flux power spectrum of the Lyman $α$ forest as a means to investigate the effects of time-dependent dark energy on structure formation. We use a linearized parameterization of the time-dependence of the dark energy equation of state and sample the parameters ($w_0,w_a$) from the the extrema of the allowed observational values as determined by the Planck results. Each chosen ($w_0,w_a$) pair is then used in a high-resolution, large-scale cosmological simulation run with a modified version of the publicly available SPH code {\tt GADGET-2}. From each of these sim…
The amplitude of the metagalactic ultraviolet background (UVB) at large-scales is impacted by two factors. First, it naturally attenuates at scales larger than mean-free-path of UVB photons due to the absorption by neutral intergalactic medium. Second, there are discrete and rare ionizing sources distributing in the Universe, emitting the UVB photons, and thus enhancing the local UVB amplitude. Therefore, for cosmological probe that is sensitive to the UVB amplitude and capable of detecting the large scale like Lyman-$α$ forest spectrum, the fluctuation due to the clustering of ionizing source…
We study and compare fitting methods for the Lyman-$α$ (Ly$α$) forest 3D correlation function. We use the nested sampler PolyChord and the community code picca to perform a Bayesian analysis which we compare with previous frequentist analyses. By studying synthetic correlation functions, we find that the frequentist profile likelihood produces results in good agreement with a full Bayesian analysis. On the other hand, Maximum Likelihood Estimation with the Gaussian approximation for the uncertainties is inadequate for current data sets. We compute for the first time the full posterior distribu…
We present an analysis of the evolution of the Lyman-series forest into the epoch of reionization using cosmological radiative transfer simulations in a scenario where reionization ends late. We explore models with different midpoints of reionization and gas temperatures. We find that once the simulations have been calibrated to match the mean flux of the observed Lyman-$α$ forest at $4 < z < 6$, they also naturally reproduce the distribution of effective optical depths of the Lyman-$β$ forest in this redshift range. We note that the tail of the largest optical depths that is most challenging …
The Effect of Interstellar Absorption on Measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Lyman-α Forest
近年来，人们利用氢Lyman-α森林的自相关性，利用BOSS巡天的数万条类星体谱，观测到了红移2 < z < 3.5的重子声峰。然而，银河系的星际介质会将吸收线引入任何河外源的光谱中。这些谱线虽然很弱，在单一BOSS光谱中无法检测到，但可能会使宇宙学信号产生偏差。为了检验这一点，我们通过叠加超过一百万个星系和类星体的光谱来生成吸收线图。我们发现，系统介绍太小，影响目前的重子声学峰值的准确性，但可能是相关的未来调查，如暗能量光谱仪（DESI）。我们概述了一种方法来解释这与未来的数据集。
We present methods for interpolating between the 1-D flux power spectrum of the Lyman-$α$ forest, as output by cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. Interpolation is necessary for cosmological parameter estimation due to the limited number of simulations possible. We construct an emulator for the Lyman-$α$ forest flux power spectrum from $21$ small simulations using Latin hypercube sampling and Gaussian process interpolation. We show that this emulator has a typical accuracy of 1.5% and a worst-case accuracy of 4%, which compares well to the current statistical error of 3 - 5% at $z < 3$ from…
