Related papers: Constraining the Power Spectrum Using the Column D…
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…
We develop a method to calculate the column density distribution of the Lyman-alpha forest for column densities in the range $10^{12.5} - 10^{14.5} cm^{-2}$. The Zel'dovich approximation, with appropriate smoothing, is used to compute the…
In this paper we review the importance of the Lyman alpha forest as a probe of structure formation in the universe. We first discuss the statistics used to describe the Lyman alpha forest and the numerical techniques used to produce…
The flux/transmission power spectrum has become a popular statistical tool in studies of the high redshift ($z > 2$) Lyman-alpha forest. At low redshifts, where the forest has thinned out into a series of well-isolated absorption lines, the…
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…
We discuss the determination of the linear power spectrum of dark matter fluctuations from measurements of the transmitted flux Ly-alpha Forest power spectrum. We show that at most scales probed by current measurements, the flux power…
By exploiting small-scale structure formation probed by Lyman-$\alpha$ forest observations, we study constraints on a model of dark matter from dark sector decay. We compute the phase space distribution of the dark matter and the linear…
Current results from the Lyman alpha forest assume that the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations follows a simple power law form, with running. We present the first analysis of Lyman alpha data to study the effect of relaxing…
I apply the well controlled Hydro-PM approximation of Gnedin & Hui to model the column density distribution of the Lyman-alpha forest for 25 different flat cosmological scenarios, including variants of the standard CDM, tilted CDM, CDM with…
We describe the properties of the Ly$\alpha$ forest in the column density range $\nhi \geq 2\times10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$ based on 1056 lines in the wavelength range 4300--5100\AA measured in extremely high S/N, $R=36,000$ spectra of four…
We derive and numerically implement an algorithm for estimating the 3D power spectrum of the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly-$\alpha$) forest flux fluctuations. The algorithm exploits the unique geometry of Ly-$\alpha$ forest data to efficiently measure…
We investigate the clustering properties of 13 QSO lines of sight in flat space, with average redshifts from z~2 to 4. We estimate the 1-D power spectrum and the integral density of neighbours, and discuss their variation with respect to…
In order to ascertain the extent of metal enrichment in the Ly alpha forest, we have analysed a very high S/N spectrum of the z = 3.625 QSO Q1422+231. We find that in high column density Ly alpha clouds, the power law column density…
We investigate the promise of the Ly-alpha forest for high precision cosmology in the era of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using low order N-point statistics. We show that with the existing data one can determine the amplitude, slope and…
Lyman alpha absorber correlations contain information about the underlying density distribution associated with a particular class of absorbers. As such, they provide an opportunity to independently measure the "bias" of the Lyman alpha…
Knowledge of the evolution of the low column density end of the Ly alpha forest (12.8 < log N_HI < 16.0 cm^-2) can provide substantial insight for models of structure formation and studies of the evolution of the ionizing background. Here…
Current analyses of the Lyman-alpha forest assume that the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations obeys a simple power law, a strong theoretical assumption which should be tested. Employing a large suite of numerical simulations…
We develop an analytical method based on the lognormal approximation to compute the column density distribution of the Lyman-alpha forest in the low column density limit. We compute the column density distributions for six different…
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 review recent developments in the theory of the Lyman-alpha forest and their implications for the role of the forest as a test of cosmological models. Simulations predict a relatively tight correlation between the local Lya optical depth…