On the Normalization of the QSO's Lyman alpha Forest Power Spectrum

Abstract

The calculation of the transmission power spectrum of QSO's Lyman alpha absorption requires two parameters for the normalization: the continuum Fc and mean transmission, i.e. average of e^{-tau}. Traditionally, the continuum is obtained by a polynomial fitting truncating it at a lower order, and the mean transmission is calculated over the entire wavelength range considered. The flux F is then normalized by the average of Fc e^{-tau}. However, the fluctuations in the transmitted flux are significantly correlated with the local background flux on scales for which the field is intermittent. In this paper, we develop a self-normalization algorithm of the transmission power spectrum based on a multiresolution analysis. This self-normalized power spectrum estimator needs neither a continuum fitting, nor pre-determining the mean transmission. With simulated samples, we show that the self-normalization algorithm can perfectly recover the transmission power spectrum from the flux regardless of how the continuum varies with wavelength. We also show that the self-normalized power spectrum is also properly normalized by the mean transmission. Moreover, this power spectrum estimator is sensitive to the non-linear behavior of the field. That is, the self-normalized power spectrum estimator can distinguish between fields with or without the fluctuation-background correlation. This cannot be accomplished by the power spectrum with the normalization by an overall mean transmission. Therefore, the self-normalized power spectrum would be useful for the discrimination among models without the uncertainties caused by free (or fitting) parameters.

24 pages, 8 figures, to appear in ApJ tentatively in the Nov 1 2001 issue

References in corpus (3)

• Measuring the galaxy power spectrum with multiresolution decomposition -- II. diagonal and off-diagonal power spectra of the LCRS galaxies
• The local power spectrum and correlation hierarchy of the cosmic mass field
• Quasi-local evolution of cosmic gravitational clustering in the weakly non-linear regime

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• Measuring the galaxy power spectrum with multiresolution decomposition -- IV. redshift distortion
• Log-Poisson Non-Gaussianity of Ly$\alpha$ Transmitted Flux Fluctuations at High Redshift
• Power Spectrum and Intermittency of Ly$\alpha$ Transmitted Flux of QSO He2347-4342
• One-point Statistics of the Cosmic Density Field in Real and Redshift Spaces with A Multiresolutional Decomposition