Related papers: The Photon Underproduction Crisis
Recent suggestions of a "photon underproduction crisis" (Kollmeier \etal\ 2014) have generated concern over the intensity and spectrum of ionizing photons in the metagalactic ultraviolet background (UVB). The balance of hydrogen…
The sources which reionized the Intergalactic Medium by redshift ~6 are still unknown. A severe constraint on the ionization process is the low emissivity required to maintain the ionization in the Lyman-{\alpha} forest.…
Understanding the sources responsible for reionizing the Universe is a key goal of observational cosmology. A discrepancy has existed between the metagalactic hydrogen ionization rate, Gamma_HI, predicted by early hydrodynamical simulations…
We compare the low redshift (z ~ 0.1) Lyman-alpha forest from hydrodynamical simulations with data from the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph (COS). We find tension between the observed number of lines with b-parameters in the range 25-45 km/s and…
The low-redshift evolution of the intergalactic medium is investigated using hydrodynamic cosmological simulations. The assumed cosmological model is a critical density cold dark matter universe. The imposed uniform background of ionizing…
We calibrate here cosmological radiative transfer simulation with ATON/RAMSES with a range of measurements of the Lyman alpha opacity from QSO absorption spectra. We find the Lyman alpha opacity to be very sensitive to the exact timing of…
Recent work has shown that the z~2.5 Lyman-alpha forest on large scales encodes information about the galaxy and quasar populations that keep the intergalactic medium photoionized. We present the first forecasts for constraining the…
We have measured the distribution function of the flux decrement caused by Lyman alpha forest absorption in a new sample of high resolution QSO spectra. The observations are compared to the results from two simulations of the Lya forest: an…
Observations of redshifted Lyman alpha forest absorption in the spectra of quasistellar objects (QSOs) provide a highly sensitive probe of the distribution of gaseous matter in the universe. Over the past two decades optical spectroscopy…
We investigate the properties of the Lyman alpha forest as predicted by numerical simulations for a range of currently viable cosmological models. This is done in order to understand the dependencies of the forest on cosmological…
We investigate the implications of our measurement of the Lyman-alpha forest opacity at redshifts 2<z<4.2 from a sample of 86 high-resolution quasar spectra for the evolution of the cosmic ultraviolet luminosity density and its sources. The…
We study the statistics of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest in a flat LCDM cosmology with the N-body + Eulerian hydrodynamics code Nyx. We produce a suite of simulations, covering the observationally relevant redshift range $2 \leq z \leq 4$. We…
Hydrodynamic cosmological simulations predict that the average opacity of the Ly-alpha forest should increase in the neighborhood of galaxies because galaxies form in dense environments. Recent observations (Adelberger et al. 2002) confirm…
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…
We use the redshift evolution of the lyman-alpha forest mean transmitted flux at z>2.5 to infer the evolution of the intensity of the ionizing background, using theoretical predictions for the density distribution of the intergalactic gas…
We examine the column density distribution function (CDDF) and Doppler parameter distribution from hydrodynamical simulations and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) observations of the Lyman-alpha forest at redshift $0\leq z\leq 0.2$.…
Estimates of the metagalactic hydrogen ionization rate from the Lyman-alpha forest opacity in QSO absorption spectra depend on the complex density distribution of neutral hydrogen along the line-of-sight. We use a large suite of high…
We compare cosmological hydrodynamical simulations combined with the homogeneous metagalactic UV background (UVB) of Haardt & Madau (2012) (HM2012) to observations of the Lyman-alpha forest that are sensitive to the thermal and ionization…
We use a large set of hydrodynamical simulations, combined with measurements of the Lyman alpha opacity of the IGM taken from the literature, to obtain robust estimates for the photoionization rate per hydrogen atom at z=5 and 6. We find…
The distribution of absorption lines in the spectra of distant quasars, called the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly-$\alpha$) forest, is a unique probe of cosmology and the intergalactic medium at high redshifts and small scales. The statistical power of…