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Register a new userLyman-alpha Forest Tomography from Background Galaxies: The First Megaparsec-Resolution Large-Scale Structure Map at z>2
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We present the first observations of foreground Lyman-$alpha$ forest absorption from high-redshift galaxies, targeting 24 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) with $zsim 2.3-2.8$ within a $5 times 15$ region of the COSMOS field. The transverse sightline separation is $sim 2,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ comoving, allowing us to create a tomographic reconstruction of the 3D Ly$alpha$ forest absorption field over the redshift range $2.20leq zleq 2.45$. The resulting map covers $6,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc} times 14,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ in the transverse plane and $230,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ along the line-of-sight with a spatial resolution of $approx 3.5,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$, and is the first high-fidelity map of large-scale structure on $simmathrm{Mpc}$ scales at $z>2$. Our map reveals significant structures with $gtrsim 10,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ extent, including several spanning the entire transverse breadth, providing qualitative evidence for the filamentary structures predicted to exist in the high-redshift cosmic web. Simulated reconstructions with the same sightline sampling, spectral resolution, and signal-to-noise ratio recover the salient structures present in the underlying 3D absorption fields. Using data from other surveys, we identified 18 galaxies with known redshifts coeval with our map volume enabling a direct comparison to our tomographic map. This shows that galaxies preferentially occupy high-density regions, in qualitative agreement with the same comparison applied to simulations. Our results establishes the feasibility of the CLAMATO survey, which aims to obtain Ly$alpha$ forest spectra for $sim 1000$ SFGs over $sim 1 ,mathrm{deg}^2$ of the COSMOS field, in order to map out IGM large-scale structure at $langle z rangle sim 2.3$ over a large volume $(100,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc})^3$.
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We present a search for spatial and redshift correlations in a 2 A resolution spectroscopic survey of the Lyman alpha forest at 2.15 < z < 3.37 toward ten QSOs concentrated within a 1-degree diameter field. We find a signal at 2.7 sigma significance for correlations of the Lyman alpha absorption line wavelengths between different lines of sight over the whole redshift range. The significance rises to 3.2 sigma if we restrict the redshift range to 2.60 < z < 3.37, and to 4.0 sigma if we further restrict the sample to lines with rest equivalent width 0.1 <= W0/(A) < 0.9. We conclude that a significant fraction of the Lyman alpha forest arises in structures whose correlation length extends at least over 30 arcmin (~26/h comoving Mpc at z=2.6 for H0 = 100h km/s/Mpc, Omega=1.0, Lambda=0). We have also calculated the three dimensional two point correlation function for Lyman alpha absorbers; we do not detect any significant signal in the data. However, we note that line blending prevents us from detecting the signal produced by a 100% overdensity of Lyman alpha absorbers in simulated data. We find that the Lyman alpha forest redshift distribution provides a more sensitive test for such clustering than the three dimensional two point correlation function.
The amplitude of fluctuations in the Ly-a forest on small spatial scales is sensitive to the temperature of the IGM and its spatial fluctuations. The temperature of the IGM and its spatial variations contain important information about hydrogen and helium reionization. We present a new measurement of the small-scale structure in the Ly-a forest from 40 high resolution, high signal-to-noise, VLT spectra at z=2.2-4.2. We convolve each Ly-a forest spectrum with a suitably chosen wavelet filter, which allows us to extract the amount of small-scale structure in the forest as a function of position across each spectrum. We compare these measurements with high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of the Ly-a forest which track more than 2 billion particles. This comparison suggests that the IGM temperature close to the cosmic mean density (T_0) peaks near z=3.4, at which point it is greater than 20,000 K at 2-sigma confidence. The temperature at lower redshift is consistent with the fall-off expected from adiabatic cooling ($T_0 propto (1+z)^2$), after the peak temperature is reached near z=3.4. At z=4.2 our results favor a temperature of T_0 = 15-20,000 K. However, owing mostly to uncertainties in the mean transmitted flux at this redshift, a cooler IGM model with T_0 = 10,000 K is only disfavored at the 2-sigma level here, although such cool IGM models are strongly discrepant with the z ~ 3-3.4 measurement. We do not detect large spatial fluctuations in the IGM temperature at any redshift covered by our data set. The simplest interpretation of our measurements is that HeII reionization completes sometime near z ~ 3.4, although statistical uncertainties are still large [Abridged].
This work presents a new physically-motivated supervised machine learning method, Hydro-BAM, to reproduce the three-dimensional Lyman-$alpha$ forest field in real and in redshift space learning from a reference hydrodynamic simulation, thereby saving about 7 orders of magnitude in computing time. We show that our method is accurate up to $ksim1,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the one- (PDF), two- (power-spectra) and three-point (bi-spectra) statistics of the reconstructed fields. When compared to the reference simulation including redshift space distortions, our method achieves deviations of $lesssim2%$ up to $k=0.6,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the monopole, $lesssim5%$ up to $k=0.9,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the quadrupole. The bi-spectrum is well reproduced for triangle configurations with sides up to $k=0.8,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$. In contrast, the commonly-adopted Fluctuating Gunn-Peterson approximation shows significant deviations already neglecting peculiar motions at configurations with sides of $k=0.2-0.4,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the bi-spectrum, being also significantly less accurate in the power-spectrum (within 5$%$ up to $k=0.7,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$). We conclude that an accurate analysis of the Lyman-$alpha$ forest requires considering the complex baryonic thermodynamical large-scale structure relations. Our hierarchical domain specific machine learning method can efficiently exploit this and is ready to generate accurate Lyman-$alpha$ forest mock catalogues covering large volumes required by surveys such as DESI and WEAVE.
Using the Ly$alpha$ mass assignment scheme (LyMAS), we make theoretical predictions for the 3-dimensional 3-point correlation function (3PCF) of the Ly$alpha$ forest at redshift $z=2.3$. We bootstrap results from the (100 $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$)$^3$ Horizon hydrodynamic simulation to a (1 $h^{-1}$ Gpc)$^3$ $N$-body simulation, considering both a uniform UV background (UVB) and a fluctuating UVB sourced by quasars with a comoving $n_q approx 10^{-5}$ $h^3$ Mpc$^{-3}$ placed either in massive halos or randomly. On scales of $10-30$ $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$, the flux 3PCF displays hierarchical scaling with the square of the 2PCF, but with an unusual value of $Q equiv zeta_{123}/(xi_{12} xi_{13} + xi_{12} xi_{23} + xi_{13} xi_{23}) approx -4.5$ that reflects the low bias of the Ly$alpha$ forest and the anti-correlation between mass density and transmitted flux. For halo-based quasars and an ionizing photon mean free path of $lambda = 300$ $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$ comoving, UVB fluctuations moderately depress the 2PCF and 3PCF, with cancelling effects on $Q$. For $lambda = 100$ $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$ or 50 $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$, UVB fluctuations substantially boost the 2PCF and 3PCF on large scales, shifting the hierarchical ratio to $Q approx -3$. We scale our simulation results to derive rough estimate of the 3PCF detectability in observational data sets for the redshift range $z=2.1 - 2.6$. At $r = 10$ $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$ and 20 $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$, we predict a signal-to-noise (SNR) of $sim$ 9 and $sim$ 7, respectively, for both BOSS and eBOSS, and $sim$ 37 and $sim$ 25 for DESI. At $r = 40$ $h^{-1} mbox{ Mpc}$ the predicted SNR is lower by $sim$ 3$-$5 times. Measuring the flux 3PCF would be a novel test of the conventional paradigm of the Ly$alpha$ forest and help separate the contributions of UVB fluctuations and density fluctuations to Ly$alpha$ forest clustering.
(Abridged) We detect the large-scale structure of Lya emission in the Universe at redshifts z=2-3.5 by measuring the cross-correlation of Lya surface brightness with quasars in SDSS/BOSS. We use a million spectra targeting Luminous Red Galaxies at z<0.8, after subtracting a best fit model galaxy spectrum from each one, as an estimate of the high-redshift Lya surface brightness. The quasar-Lya emission cross-correlation we detect has a shape consistent with a LambdaCDM model with Omega_M =0.30^+0.10-0.07. The predicted amplitude of this cross-correlation is proportional to the product of the mean Lya surface brightness, <mu_alpha>, the amplitude of mass fluctuations, and the quasar and Lya emission bias factors. Using known values, we infer <mu_alpha>(b_alpha/3) = (3.9 +/- 0.9) x 10^-21 erg/s cm^-2 A^-1 arcsec^-2, where b_alpha is the Lya emission bias factor. If the dominant sources of Lya emission are star forming galaxies, we infer rho_SFR = (0.28 +/- 0.07) (3/b_alpha) /yr/Mpc^3 at z=2-3.5. For b_alpha=3, this value is a factor of 21-35 above previous estimates from individually detected Lya emitters, although consistent with the total rho_SFR derived from dust-corrected, continuum UV surveys. 97% of the Lya emission in the Universe at these redshifts is therefore undetected in previous surveys of Lya emitters. Our measurement is much greater than seen from stacking analyses of faint halos surrounding previously detected Lya emitters, but we speculate that it arises from similar Lya halos surrounding all luminous star-forming galaxies. We also detect redshift space anisotropy of the quasar-Lya emission cross-correlation, finding evidence at the 3.0 sigma level that it is radially elongated, consistent with distortions caused by radiative-transfer effects (Zheng et al. (2011)). Our measurements represent the first application of the intensity mapping technique to optical observations.
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