Probing Time-Dependent Dark Energy with the Flux Power Spectrum of the Lyman α Forest

We present new simulations of the flux power spectrum of the Lyman $\alpha$ forest as a means to investigate the effects of time-dependent dark energy on structure formation. We use a linearized parameterization of the time-dependence of the dark energy equation of state and sample the parameters ($w_0,w_a$) from the the extrema of the allowed observational values as determined by the Planck results. Each chosen ($w_0,w_a$) pair is then used in a high-resolution, large-scale cosmological simulation run with a modified version of the publicly available SPH code {\tt GADGET-2}. From each of these simulations we extract synthetic Lyman $\alpha$ forest spectra and calculate the flux power spectrum. We use the k-sample Anderson-Darling test to analyze the effects of dark energy on the Lyman $\alpha$ forest. We compare each dark energy power spectrum to that due to a cosmological constant power spectrum. We find, however, that there is only a marginal effect of the choice of allowed dark energy models on the flux power spectrum.