Related papers: The Lyman-alpha forest according to LUQAS
Absorption lines in the Lyman-alpha forest can be thought of as peaks in neutral hydrogen density along lines of sight. The column density distribution (the number density of absorption lines as a function of column density) is then a…
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…
Small-scale correlations measured in the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) forest encode information about the intergalactic medium and the primordial matter power spectrum. In this article, we present and implement a simple method to measure the…
We present a new bound on the ultra-light axion (ULA) dark matter mass $m_\text{a}$, using the Lyman-alpha forest to look for suppressed cosmic structure growth: a 95% lower limit $m_\text{a} > 2 \times 10^{-20}\,\text{eV}$. This strongly…
The Lyman-alpha forest has opened a new redshift regime for cosmological investigation. At z > 2 it provides a unique probe of cosmic geometry and an independent constraint on dark energy that is not subject to standard candle or ruler…
We investigate the dependence of QSO Lyman-alpha absorption features on the temperature of the absorbing gas and on the amplitude of the underlying dark matter fluctuations. We use high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations in cold dark…
We outline the physical picture of the high-redshift Ly-alpha forest that has emerged from cosmological simulations, describe statistical characteristics of the forest that can be used to test theories of structure formation, present a…
We present constraints on the amplitude and shape of the matter power spectrum and the density of dark matter within the framework of a standard LambdaCDM model. We use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to combine independent measurements…
We present a semi-analytic model for the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest that is inspired by the Halo Model. This model is built on the absorption line decomposition of the forest. Flux correlations are decomposed into those within each absorption…
We directly measure the evolution of the intergalactic Lyman-alpha effective optical depth, tau_eff, over the redshift range 2<z<4.2 from a sample of 86 high-resolution, high-signal-to-noise quasar spectra obtained with Keck/ESI,…
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…
We explore the requirements for a Lyman-alpha forest (LyaF) survey designed to measure the angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter at 2~<z~<4 using the standard ruler provided by baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO). The goal would…
The Lyman alpha forest power spectrum has been measured on large scales by the BOSS survey in SDSS-III at $z\sim 2.3$, has been shown to agree well with linear theory predictions, and has provided the first measurement of Baryon Acoustic…
A combined analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Lyman-a forest data allows to constrain the matter power spectrum from small scales of about 1 Mpc/h all the way to the horizon scale. The long lever arm and complementarity…
We measure the effective optical depth in the Lyman-alpha (Ly$\alpha$) forest using 40,035 quasar spectra from the Twelfth Data Release (DR12) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of SDSS-IV. A rigorous selection based on…
We present the one-dimensional Lyman-$\alpha$ forest power spectrum measurement derived from the data release 1 (DR1) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The measurement of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest power spectrum along the…
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 present the first moderate resolution (approx. 40--120 km/s) spectroscopic observations of the bright (V<16.7) high-redshift QSOs Q1107+487 (z_{em} = 2.965) and Q1442+295 (z_{em} = 2.669) (Sanduleak & Pesch 1989). The relatively high…
Based on the empirical formulas governing the distribution of Ly-a forest absorption, we use a Monte-Carlo technique to calculate the average HeII optical depth produced by these forest lines. A substantial contribution to HeII absorption…
The analysis of the Lyman-alpha forest of absorption lines in quasar spectra has emerged as a potentially powerful technique to constrain the linear matter power spectrum. In most previous work, the amplitude of the ionizing background was…