Related papers: The Ly-alpha forest in a truncated hierarchical st…
Cosmological simulations with gas dynamics suggest that the Lyman-alpha forest is produced mainly by "small scale structure" --- filaments and sheets that are the high redshift analog of today's galaxy superclusters. There is no sharp…
A stochastic model relating the parameters of astrophysical structures to the parameters of their granular components is applied to the formation of hierarchical, large-scale structures from galaxies assumed as point-like objects. If the…
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…
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…
We present an analysis of the non-Gaussianity in the distribution of Ly$\alpha$ forest lines in the QSO absorption spectra. Statistical tests performed on this data indicate that there may be large scale structure even though the power…
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…
Straightforward physical arguments are used to derive the properties of Lyman-alpha forest absorbers. It is shown that many aspects of the current physical picture of the forest, in particular the fact that the absorption arises in extended…
Lyman-Alpha (Ly$\alpha$) is the strongest emission line in the Universe and is frequently used to detect and study the most distant galaxies. Because Lya is a resonant line, photons typically scatter prior to escaping; this scattering…
The abundance, temperature, and clustering of metals in the intergalactic medium are important parameters for understanding their cosmic evolution and quantifying their impact on cosmological analysis with the Ly $\alpha$ forest. The…
The Northern Local Void is a huge underdense region of the nearby Universe situated between the Hercules, Coma and Local Superclusters. We present an investigation of the galaxy distribution in the Northern Local Void using void statistics.…
The Lyman-alpha forest is a portion of the observed light spectrum of distant galactic nuclei which allows us to probe remote regions of the Universe that are otherwise inaccessible. The observed Lyman-alpha forest of a quasar light…
The aim of this review article is to give a comprehensive description of the scaling properties detected for the distribution of cosmic structures. Due to the great variety of statistical methods to describe the large-scale structure of the…
These lecture notes concentrate on a few specific topics concerning the distribution of galaxies on scales from 0.1 to nearly 1000/h Mpc. The main aim is to provide the students with the information and tools to familiarize with a few basic…
The Lya forest has emerged as one of the few systems capable of probing small-scale structure at high-z with high precision. In this talk I highlight two areas in which the Lya forest is shedding light on fundamental questions in cosmology,…
The Lyman-$\alpha$ (hereafter Ly-$\alpha$) forest is a probe of large-scale matter density fluctuations at high redshift, $z > 2.1$. It consists of HI absorption spectra along individual lines-of-sight. If the line-of-sight density is large…
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 search for the most suitable set of cosmological parameters that describes the observable universe. The search includes the possibility of quintessential flat universes, i.e., the analysis is restricted to the determination of the…
Cosmological simulations with gas provide a detailed description of the intergalactic medium, making possible predictions of neutral hydrogen absorption in the spectra of background QSOs. We present results from a high-resolution…
We show that it is now possible to image optically thick $\lya$ clouds in fluorescent $\lya$ emission with a relatively long ($\sim 20 $hr) integration on a large ($\sim 10 $m) telescope. For a broad range of column densities ($N\gsim…
(abridged) Following our previous work on metal abundances of a double damped Ly-alpha system with a line-of-sight separation ~2000 km/s (Ellison & Lopez 2001), we present VLT UVES abundances of 3 new systems spanning a total of \~6000 km/s…