Precision Cosmology from the Lyman-alpha Forest: Power Spectrum and Bispectrum

Abstract

We investigate the promise of the Ly-alpha forest for high precision cosmology in the era of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using low order N-point statistics. We show that with the existing data one can determine the amplitude, slope and curvature of the slope of the matter power spectrum with a few percent precision. Higher order statistics such as the bispectrum provide independent information that can confirm and improve upon the statistical precision from the power spectrum alone. The achievable precision is comparable to that from the cosmic microwave background with upcoming satellites, and complements it by measuring the power spectrum amplitude and shape at smaller scales. Since the data cover the redshift range 2<z<4, one can also extract the evolution of the growth factor and Hubble parameter over this range, and provide useful constraints on the presence of dark energy at z>2.

arXiv comment14 pages, 17 figures, accepted to MNRAS; minor changes made (section 2) and references added

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• The Physics of the Intergalactic Medium
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• Suite of Hydrodynamical Simulations for the Lyman-Alpha Forest with Massive Neutrinos
• Probing decisive answers to dark energy questions from cosmic complementarity and lensing tomography
• The bispectrum of the Lyman-alpha forest at z~2-2.4 from a Large sample of UVES QSO Absorption Spectra (LUQAS)
• Testing the accuracy of the Hydro-PM approximation in numerical simulations of the Lyman-alpha forest
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• Impact of Massive Neutrinos and Dark Radiation on the High-redshift Cosmic Web. I. Lyman-Alpha Forest Observables
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• Probing primordial non-Gaussianity: The 3D Bispectrum of Ly-alpha forest and the redshifted 21-cm signal from the post reionization epoch
• The redshifted HI 21 cm signal from the post-reionization epoch: Cross-correlations with other cosmological probes
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• Detecting preheating in proto-clusters with Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest Tomography
• Lyman Alpha Flux Power Spectrum and Its Covariance
• Constraining warm dark matter power spectrum using the cross-correlation of HI 21 cm signal and the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
• Measurement of redshift-space two- and three-point correlation of Ly$\alpha$ absorbers at $1.7<z<3.5$: Implications on evolution of the physical properties of IGM
• The Compressed 3D Lyman-Alpha Forest Bispectrum
• Covariance of the One-Dimensional Mass Power Spectrum
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• Lya2pcf: an efficient pipeline to estimate two- and three-point correlation functions of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest