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Register a new userThe Effect of Interstellar Absorption on Measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Lyman-{alpha} Forest
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In recent years, the autocorrelation of the hydrogen Lyman-{alpha} forest has been used to observe the baryon acoustic peak at redshift 2 < z < 3.5 using tens of thousands of QSO spectra from the BOSS survey. However, the interstellar medium of the Milky-Way introduces absorption lines into the spectrum of any extragalactic source. These lines, while weak and undetectable in a single BOSS spectrum, could potentially bias the cosmological signal. In order to examine this, we generate absorption line maps by stacking over a million spectra of galaxies and QSOs. We find that the systematics introduced are too small to affect the current accuracy of the baryon acoustic peak, but might be relevant to future surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We outline a method to account for this with future datasets.
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The baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale acts as a standard ruler for measuring cosmological distances and has therefore emerged as a leading probe of cosmic expansion history. However, any physical effect that alters the length of the ruler can lead to a bias in our determination of distance and expansion rate. One of these physical effects is the streaming velocity, the relative velocity between baryons and dark matter in the early Universe, which couples to the BAO scale due to their common origin in acoustic waves at recombination. In this work, we investigate the impact of streaming velocity on the BAO feature of the Lyman-$alpha$ forest auto-power spectrum, one of the main tracers being used by the recently commissioned DESI spectrograph. To do this, we develop a new perturbative model for Lyman-$alpha$ flux density contrast which is complete to second order for a certain set of fields, and applicable to any redshift-space tracer of structure since it is based only on symmetry considerations. We find that there are 8 biasing coefficients through second order. We find streaming velocity-induced shifts in the BAO scale of 0.081--0.149% (transverse direction) and 0.053--0.058% (radial direction), depending on the model for the biasing coefficients used. These are smaller than, but not negligible compared to, the DESI Lyman-$alpha$ BAO error budget, which is 0.46% on the overall scale. The sensitivity of these results to our choice of bias parameters underscores the need for future work to measure the higher-order biasing coefficients from simulations, especially for future experiments beyond DESI.
We provide an analytical description of the line broadening of HI absorbers in the Lyman-alpha forest resulting from Doppler broadening and Jeans smoothing. We demonstrate that our relation captures the dependence of the line-width on column density for narrow lines in z~3 mock spectra remarkably well. Broad lines at a given column density arise when the underlying density structure is more complex, and such clustering is not captured by our model. Our understanding of the line broadening opens the way to a new method to characterise the thermal state of the intergalactic medium and to determine the sizes of the absorbing structures.
We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the three-dimensional correlation function of the transmitted flux fraction in the Lya forest of high-redshift quasars. The study uses 48,640 quasars in the redshift range $2.1le z le 3.5$ from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III). At a mean redshift $z=2.3$, we measure the monopole and quadrupole components of the correlation function for separations in the range $20hMpc<r<200hMpc$. A peak in the correlation function is seen at a separation equal to $(1.01pm0.03)$ times the distance expected for the BAO peak within a concordance $Lambda$CDM cosmology. This first detection of the BAO peak at high redshift, when the universe was strongly matter dominated, results in constraints on the angular diameter distance $da$ and the expansion rate $H$ at $z=2.3$ that, combined with priors on $H_0$ and the baryon density, require the existence of dark energy. Combined with constraints derived from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, this result implies $H(z=2.3)=(224pm8){rm km,s^{-1}Mpc^{-1}}$, indicating that the time derivative of the cosmological scale parameter $dot{a}=H(z=2.3)/(1+z)$ is significantly greater than that measured with BAO at $zsim0.5$. This demonstrates that the expansion was decelerating in the range $0.7<z<2.3$, as expected from the matter domination during this epoch. Combined with measurements of $H_0$, one sees the pattern of deceleration followed by acceleration characteristic of a dark-energy dominated universe.
We report a detection of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature in the flux-correlation function of the Ly{alpha} forest of high-redshift quasars with a statistical significance of five standard deviations. The study uses 137,562 quasars in the redshift range $2.1le z le 3.5$ from the Data Release 11 (DR11) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of SDSS-III. This sample contains three times the number of quasars used in previous studies. The measured position of the BAO peak determines the angular distance, $D_A(z=2.34)$ and expansion rate, $H(z=2.34)$, both on a scale set by the sound horizon at the drag epoch, $r_d$. We find $D_A/r_d=11.28pm0.65(1sigma)^{+2.8}_{-1.2}(2sigma)$ and $D_H/r_d=9.18pm0.28(1sigma)pm0.6(2sigma)$ where $D_H=c/H$. The optimal combination, $sim D_H^{0.7}D_A^{0.3}/r_d$ is determined with a precision of $sim2%$. For the value $r_d=147.4~{rm Mpc}$, consistent with the CMB power spectrum measured by Planck, we find $D_A(z=2.34)=1662pm96(1sigma)~{rm Mpc}$ and $H(z=2.34)=222pm7(1sigma)~{rm km,s^{-1}Mpc^{-1}}$. Tests with mock catalogs and variations of our analysis procedure have revealed no systematic uncertainties comparable to our statistical errors. Our results agree with the previously reported BAO measurement at the same redshift using the quasar-Ly{alpha} forest cross-correlation. The auto-correlation and cross-correlation approaches are complementary because of the quite different impact of redshift-space distortion on the two measurements. The combined constraints from the two correlation functions imply values of $D_A/r_d$ and $D_H/r_d$ that are, respectively, 7% low and 7% high compared to the predictions of a flat $Lambda$CDM cosmological model with the best-fit Planck parameters. With our estimated statistical errors, the significance of this discrepancy is $approx 2.5sigma$.
We describe fitting methods developed to analyze fluctuations in the Lyman-{alpha} forest and measure the parameters of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). We apply our methods to BOSS Data Release 9. Our method is based on models of the three-dimensional correlation function in physical coordinate space, and includes the effects of redshift-space distortions, anisotropic non-linear broadening, and broadband distortions. We allow for independent scale factors along and perpendicular to the line of sight to minimize the dependence on our assumed fiducial cosmology and to obtain separate measurements of the BAO angular and relative velocity scales. Our fitting software and the input files needed to reproduce our main BOSS Data Release 9 results are publicly available.
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