학술논문

Planting a Lyman alpha forest on AbacusSummit
Document Type
article
Source
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 524(1)
Subject
Nuclear and Plasma Physics
Physical Sciences
methods
numerical - quasars
absorption lines - cosmology
theory
Astronomical and Space Sciences
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Astronomical sciences
Particle and high energy physics
Space sciences
Language
Abstract
The full-shape correlations of the Lyman alpha (Ly α) forest contain a wealth of cosmological information through the Alcock-Paczyński effect. However, these measurements are challenging to model without robustly testing and verifying the theoretical framework used for analysing them. Here, we leverage the accuracy and volume of the N-body simulation suite AbacusSummit to generate high-resolution Ly α skewers and quasi-stellar object (QSO) catalogues. One of the main goals of our mocks is to aid in the full-shape Ly α analysis planned by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) team. We provide optical depth skewers for six of the fiducial cosmology base-resolution simulations (, N = 69123) at z = 2.5. We adopt a simple recipe based on the Fluctuating Gunn-Peterson Approximation (FGPA) for constructing these skewers from the matter density in an N-body simulation and calibrate it against the 1D and 3D Ly α power spectra extracted from the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG (TNG;, N = 25003). As an important application, we study the non-linear broadening of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak and show the cross-correlation between DESI-like QSOs and our Ly α forest skewers. We find differences on small scales between the Kaiser approximation prediction and our mock measurements of the Ly α × QSO cross-correlation, which would be important to account for in upcoming analyses. The AbacusSummit Ly α forest mocks open up the possibility for improved modelling of cross-correlations between Ly α and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing and Ly α and QSOs, and for forecasts of the 3-point Ly α correlation function. Our catalogues and skewers are publicly available on Globus via the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) (full link under the section 'Data Availability').