Ly{alpha} forest power spectrum at 1.8<=z<=3.4 Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Walther M.
  2. Hennawi J.F.
  3. Hiss H.
  4. Onorbe J.
  5. Lee K.-G.
  6. Rorai A.,O'Meara J.
  7. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

We present a new measurement of the Ly{alpha} forest power spectrum at 1.8<z<3.4 using 74 Keck/HIRES and VLT/UVES high-resolution, high-signal-to-noise-ratio quasar spectra. We developed a custom pipeline to measure the power spectrum and its uncertainty, which fully accounts for finite resolution and noise and corrects for the bias induced by masking missing data, damped Ly{alpha} absorption systems, and metal absorption lines. Our measurement results in unprecedented precision on the small-scale modes k>0.02s/km, inaccessible to previous SDSS/BOSS analyses. It is well known that these high-k modes are highly sensitive to the thermal state of the intergalactic medium, but contamination by narrow metal lines is a significant concern. We quantify the effect of metals on the small- scale power and find a modest effect on modes with k<0.1s/km. As a result, by masking metals and restricting to k<0.1s/km, their impact is completely mitigated. We present an end-to-end Bayesian forward-modeling framework whereby mock spectra with the same noise, resolution, and masking as our data are generated from Ly{alpha} forest simulations. These mock spectra are used to build a custom emulator, enabling us to interpolate between a sparse grid of models and perform Markov chain Monte Carlo fits. Our results agree well with BOSS on scales k<0.02s/km, where the measurements overlap. The combination of the percent-level low-k precision of BOSS with our 5%-15% high-k measurements results in a powerful new data set for precisely constraining the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, cosmological parameters, and the nature of dark matter.

Keywords
  1. quasars
  2. visible-astronomy
  3. spectroscopy
  4. redshifted
  5. intergalactic-medium
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2018ApJ...852...22W
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/852/22
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/852/22
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.18520022

Access

Web browser access HTML
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/852/22
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/852/22
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/852/22
IVOA Table Access TAP
http://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).
IVOA Cone Search SCS
For use with a cone search client (e.g., TOPCAT).
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/conesearch/0?
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/852/22/sample?
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/852/22/sample?

History

2018-09-19T05:55:48Z
Resource record created
2018-09-19T05:55:48Z
Created
2018-10-24T10:47:14Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr