Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyman Alpha Forest

Abstract

We use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations in a (600 Mpc)^3 volume to study the observability of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the intergalactic medium as probed by Lyman alpha forest (LAF) absorption. The large scale separation between the wavelength of the BAO mode (~150 Mpc) and the size of LAF absorbers (~100 kpc) makes this a numerically challenging problem. We report on several 2048^3 simulations of the LAF using the ENZO code. We adopt WMAP5 concordance cosmological parameters and power spectrum including BAO perturbations. 5000 synthetic HI absorption line spectra are generated randomly piercing the box face. We calculate the cross-correlation function between widely separated pairs. We detect the BAO signal at z=3 where theory predicts to moderate statistical significance.

5 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of SciDAC 2009, Ed. J. Hules, Journal of Physics: Conference Series

References in corpus (3)

• Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• Dark energy and curvature from a future baryonic acoustic oscillation survey using the Lyman-alpha forest
• A Concordance Model of the Lyman-alpha Forest at z = 1.95

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• Fast, large volume, GPU enabled simulations for the Ly-alpha forest: power spectrum forecasts for baryon acoustic oscillation experiments