Correlations in the Lyman alpha forest: testing the gravitational instability paradigm

Abstract

We investigate correlations between the long wavelength fluctuations and the small scale power in the Lyman alpha forest. We show that such correlations can be used to discriminate between fluctuations induced by large scale structure and those produced by non-gravitational processes such as fluctuations in the continuum of the quasar or in the temperature of the gas. The correlations observed in Q1422+231 are in agreement with the predictions of numerical simulations, indicating that non-gravitational fluctuations on large scales have to be small compared those induced by the large scale structure of the universe, contributing less than 10 % (95 % confidence) of the observed power. We also show the sensitivity of such statistics to the equation of state of the gas and its mean temperature.

9 figures, ApJ accepted

References in corpus (4)

• The Observed Probability Distribution Function, Power Spectrum, and Correlation Function of the Transmitted Flux in the Lyman-alpha Forest
• The Bispectrum of IRAS Galaxies
• Measuring the equation of state of the intergalactic medium
• Suppressing Linear Power on Dwarf Galaxy Halo Scales

Cited by in corpus (22)

• Towards a Precise Measurement of Matter Clustering: Lyman-alpha Forest Data at Redshifts 2-4
• 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
• Higher Order Contributions to the 21 cm Power Spectrum
• Precision Cosmology from the Lyman-alpha Forest: Power Spectrum and Bispectrum
• Inferring the Linear Power Spectrum from the Lyman-alpha Forest
• The Signatures of Large-scale Temperature and Intensity Fluctuations in the Lyman-alpha Forest
• Particle mesh simulations of the Lyman-alpha forest and the signature of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the intergalactic medium
• The Acoustic Peak in the Lyman Alpha Forest
• Tightening Constraints from the Lyman Alpha Forest with the Flux Probability Distribution Function
• Hierarchical clustering in chameleon $f(R)$ gravity
• The bispectrum of the Lyman-alpha forest at z~2-2.4 from a Large sample of UVES QSO Absorption Spectra (LUQAS)
• The Impact of Temperature Fluctuations on the Lyman-alpha Forest Power Spectrum
• The Cosmic Baryon Fraction and the Extragalactic Ionizing Background
• First Detection of Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing and Lyman-α Forest Bispectrum
• Lenses in the forest: cross-correlation of the Lyman-alpha flux with CMB lensing
• UV Background Fluctuations and Three-Point Correlations in the Large Scale Clustering of the Lyman-alpha Forest
• Probing the Statistics of the Temperature-Density Relation of the IGM
• A measurement of the Lyman-beta forest power spectrum and its cross with the Lyman-alpha forest in X-Shooter XQ-100
• Cross-correlations of the Lyman-alpha forest with weak lensing convergence I: Analytical Estimates of S/N and Implications for Neutrino Mass and Dark Energy
• Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy numerical solution (CMBAns) I: An introduction to $C_l$ calculation
• The Compressed 3D Lyman-Alpha Forest Bispectrum
• Lya2pcf: an efficient pipeline to estimate two- and three-point correlation functions of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest