LyaCoLoRe: Synthetic Datasets for Current and Future Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest BAO Surveys

Abstract

The statistical power of Lyman-$\alpha$ forest Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements is set to increase significantly in the coming years as new instruments such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument deliver progressively more constraining data. Generating mock datasets for such measurements will be important for validating analysis pipelines and evaluating the effects of systematics. With such studies in mind, we present LyaCoLoRe: a package for producing synthetic Lyman-$\alpha$ forest survey datasets for BAO analyses. LyaCoLoRe transforms initial Gaussian random field skewers into skewers of transmitted flux fraction via a number of fast approximations. In this work we explain the methods of producing mock datasets used in LyaCoLoRe, and then measure correlation functions on a suite of realisations of such data. We demonstrate that we are able to recover the correct BAO signal, as well as large-scale bias parameters similar to literature values. Finally, we briefly describe methods to add further astrophysical effects to our skewers - high column density systems and metal absorbers - which act as potential complications for BAO analyses.

arXiv comment29 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (58)

• Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant
• Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae
• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• Efficient Computation of CMB anisotropies in closed FRW models
• Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample
• The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Local Hubble Constant
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: Power-spectrum analysis of the final dataset and cosmological implications
• Large-Scale Structure of the Universe and Cosmological Perturbation Theory
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 Galaxy Sample
• The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: mapping the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyα forest of BOSS DR11 quasars
• Equation of State of the Photoionized Intergalactic Medium
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Ly-α forest of BOSS quasars
• Gravitational Collapse of Small-Scale Structure as the Origin of the Lyman Alpha Forest
• The Lyman-alpha Forest Power Spectrum from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Measurement of BAO correlations at $z=2.3$ with SDSS DR12 \lya-Forests
• Recovery of the Power Spectrum of Mass Fluctuations from Observations of the Lyman-alpha Forest
• The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: First measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2
• The Lyman Alpha Forest from Gravitational Collapse in the CDM+Lambda Model
• Solving Large Scale Structure in Ten Easy Steps with COLA
• Evolution of Structure in the Intergalactic Medium and the Nature of the Ly-alpha Forest
• The Metallicity of High Redshift Galaxies: The Abundance of Zinc in 34 Damped Lyman Alpha Systems from z = 0.7 to 3.4
• Baryon acoustic oscillations from the complete SDSS-III Ly$\alpha$-quasar cross-correlation function at $z=2.4$
• Measurement of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyman-alpha Forest Fluctuations in BOSS Data Release 9
• Baryon acoustic oscillations from the cross-correlation of Ly$\alpha$ absorption and quasars in eBOSS DR14
• The Evolution of the Effective Equation of State of the IGM
• Baryon acoustic oscillations at z = 2.34 from the correlations of Ly$\alpha$ absorption in eBOSS DR14
• Toward a Measurement of the Cosmological Geometry at z~2: Predicting Lyman-alpha Forest Correlation in Three Dimensions, and the Potential of Future Data Sets
• The one-dimensional Ly-alpha forest power spectrum from BOSS
• A Refined Measurement of the Mean Transmitted Flux in the Ly-alpha Forest over 2 < z < 5 Using Composite Quasar Spectra
• A Measurement of the Temperature-Density Relation in the Intergalactic Medium Using a New Lyman-alpha Absorption Line Fitting Method
• Dark energy and curvature from a future baryonic acoustic oscillation survey using the Lyman-alpha forest
• The Statistics of Density Peaks and the Column Density Distribution of the Lyman-Alpha Forest
• The large-scale Quasar-Lyman α Forest Cross-Correlation from BOSS
• The Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Variability Selection and Quasar Luminosity Function
• Fitting Methods for Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyman-α Forest Fluctuations in BOSS Data Release 9
• The UCSD HIRES/KECK I Damped Lya Abundance Database: IV. Probing Galactic Enrichment Histories with Nitrogen
• A New Measurement of the Temperature Density Relation of the IGM From Voigt Profile Fitting
• On Estimating Lyman-alpha Forest Correlations between Multiple Sightlines
• A 14 $h^{-3}$ Gpc${}^3$ study of cosmic homogeneity using BOSS DR12 quasar sample
• Probing the Circumgalactic Medium at High-Redshift Using Composite BOSS Spectra of Strong Lyman-alpha Forest Absorbers
• The SDSS-DR12 large-scale cross-correlation of Damped Lyman Alpha Systems with the Lyman Alpha Forest
• Towards a Unified Description of the Intergalactic Medium at Redshift z~2.5
• A New Precision Measurement of the Small-Scale Line-of-Sight Power Spectrum of the Ly$\alpha$ Forest
• Bias, redshift space distortions and primordial nongaussianity of nonlinear transformations: application to Lyman alpha forest
• The Effect of High Column Density Systems on the Measurement of the Lyman αForest Correlation Function
• Generating mock data sets for large-scale Lyman-α forest correlation measurements
• Mock Quasar-Lyman-α Forest Data-sets for the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• Correlations in the three-dimensional Lyman-alpha forest contaminated by high column density absorbers
• The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measuring the cross-correlation between the MgII flux transmission field and quasars and galaxies at $z=0.59$
• Modelling the cosmic neutral hydrogen from DLAs and 21 cm observations
• Simulations of BAO reconstruction with a quasar Lyman-alpha survey
• The triply-ionized carbon forest from eBOSS: cosmological correlations with quasars in SDSS-IV DR14
• Absorber Model: the Halo-like model for the Lyman-alpha forest
• The Cosmological Bias Factor of Damped Lyman Alpha systems: Dependence on Metal Line Strength
• Quasar -- CIV forest cross-correlation with SDSS DR12

Cited by in corpus (25)

• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological Implications from two Decades of Spectroscopic Surveys at the Apache Point observatory
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations with Lyman-$\alpha$ forests
• DESI 2024 IV: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the Lyman Alpha Forest
• The completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from multi-tracer BAO analysis with galaxies and voids
• Cosmology beyond BAO from the 3D distribution of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Constraints on the cosmic expansion rate at redshift 2.3 from the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• A tomographic map of the large-scale matter distribution using the eBOSS Stripe 82 Ly-$\alpha$ forest
• CoLoRe: fast cosmological realisations over large volumes with multiple tracers
• The 3D Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest Power Spectrum from eBOSS DR16
• Quasar Factor Analysis -- An Unsupervised and Probabilistic Quasar Continuum Prediction Algorithm with Latent Factor Analysis
• The Alcock-Paczyński effect from Lyman-$\alpha$ forest correlations: Analysis validation with synthetic data
• Relaxing CMB bounds on Primordial Black Holes: the role of ionization fronts
• Synthetic spectra for Lyman-$\alpha$ forest analysis in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Direct cosmological inference from three-dimensional correlations of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Mapping Lyman-alpha forest three-dimensional large scale structure in real and redshift space
• Observing relativistic features in large-scale structure surveys -- II: Doppler magnification in an ensemble of relativistic simulations
• Planting a Lyman alpha forest on AbacusSummit
• The ACCEL2 Project: Precision Measurements of EFT Parameters and BAO Peak Shifts for the Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest
• Measurement of the small-scale 3D Lyman-$\alpha$ forest power spectrum
• The cross-correlation of galaxies in absorption with the Lyman $\alpha$ forest
• Lognormal semi-numerical simulations of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest: comparison with full hydrodynamic simulations
• The Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest from LBGs: First 3D Correlation Measurement with DESI and Prospects for Cosmology
• Optimal data compression for Lyman-$\alpha$ forest cosmology
• Lya2pcf: an efficient pipeline to estimate two- and three-point correlation functions of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Generation of Lognormal Synthetic Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest Spectra for $P_{1D}$ Analysis