Related papers: The Low Column Density Lyman-alpha Forest
We use 2167 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasar spectra to search for low-density oxygen in the Intergalactic Medium (IGM). Oxygen absorption is detected on a pixel-by-pixel basis by its correlation with Lyman-alpha forest absorption. We…
Lyman-alpha forest lines in QSO spectra have typical widths of 20-50 km/s. Low column density absorbers in cosmological simulations are large, diffuse structures, and the Hubble flow across the spatially extended absorber is usually the…
The WMAP team has recently highlighted the usefulness of combining the Ly-alpha forest constraints with those from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This combination is particularly powerful as a probe of the primordial shape of the…
We use the probability distribution function (PDF) of the lya forest flux at z=2-3, measured from high-resolution UVES/VLT data, and hydrodynamical simulations to obtain constraints on cosmological parameters and the thermal state of the…
High resolution N-body simulations of cold dark matter (CDM) models predict that galaxies and clusters have cuspy halos with excessive substructure. Observations reveal smooth halos with central density cores. One possible resolution of…
We study the evolution with redshift, from z=5 to z=0, of the Lyman-alpha forest in a CDM model using numerical simulations including collisionless particles only. The baryonic component is assumed to follow the dark matter distribution. We…
We present a study of the effect of High Column Density (HCD) systems on the Lyman \alpha forest correlation function on large scales. We study the effect both numerically, by inserting HCD systems on mock spectra for a specific model, and…
We present a suite of cosmological N-body simulations with cold dark matter and baryons aiming at modeling the low-density regions of the IGM as probed by the Lyman-$\alpha$ forests at high redshift. The simulations are designed to match…
We study the distribution of low-redshift Ly$\alpha$ clouds in a CDM model using numerical simulations including photoionization and cooling of the baryonic component. The ionizing background is found to be efficient enough to keep most of…
We present high S/N echelle spectra of the recently discovered ultraluminous QSO APM 08279+5255 and use these data to re-examine the abundance of Carbon in Ly alpha forest clouds. In agreement with previous work, we find that approximately…
The Lyman-$\alpha$ forest is a valuable probe of dark matter models featuring a scale-dependent suppression of the power spectrum as compared to $\Lambda$CDM. In this work, we present a new estimator of the Lyman-$\alpha$ flux power…
Using a sample of approximately 14,000 z>2.1 quasars observed in the first year of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), we measure the three-dimensional correlation function of absorption in the Lyman-alpha forest. The…
The comparison of quasar absorption spectra with numerically simulated spectra from hierarchical cosmological models of structure formation promises to be a valuable tool to discriminate among these models. We present simulation results for…
We present the first detection of a correlation between the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing. For each Lyman-$\alpha$ forest in SDSS-III/BOSS DR12, we correlate the one-dimensional power spectrum with the…
Results are presented for one-dimensional numerical hydrodynamics computations of the structure and evolution of Lya forest clouds gravitationally confined by dark matter minihalos. The clouds are developed from linear perturbations at high…
We present HST STIS/G140M spectra of 15 extragalactic targets, which we combine with GHRS/G160M data to examine the statistical properties of the low-z Ly-alpha forest. We evaluate the physical properties of these Ly-alpha absorbers and…
We present the first results from an ongoing survey for Damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) in the spectra of z>2 quasars observed in the course of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky…
We describe our surveys of low column density Lyman-alpha absorbers [N(HI) = 10^(12.5-16.0) cm^-2], which show that the warm photoionized IGM contains 30% of all baryons at z < 0.1. This fraction is consistent with cosmological simulations,…
The cross-section of sky occupied by a particular neutral hydrogen column density provides insight into the nature of Lyman-alpha absorption systems. We have measured this column density distribution at z=0 using 21-cm HI emission from a…
We present results from high resolution (R\simeq 28000) spectra of six high- redshift QSOs taken at the ESO NTT telescope that allow the detailed study of the Ly-alpha population in the redshift interval z=2.8-4.1. The typical Doppler…