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Validation of the DESI 2024 Lyman Alpha Forest BAL Masking Strategy

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arxiv 2405.09737 v2 pith:J4CITH35 submitted 2024-05-16 astro-ph.CO

Validation of the DESI 2024 Lyman Alpha Forest BAL Masking Strategy

classification astro-ph.CO
keywords forestabsorptiondatabalsfeaturessyntheticdesiimpact
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Broad absorption line quasars (BALs) exhibit blueshifted absorption relative to a number of their prominent broad emission features. These absorption features can contribute to quasar redshift errors and add absorption to the Lyman-alpha (LyA) forest that is unrelated to large-scale structure. We present a detailed analysis of the impact of BALs on the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) results with the LyA forest from the first year of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The baseline strategy for the first year analysis is to mask all pixels associated with all BAL absorption features that fall within the wavelength region used to measure the forest. We explore a range of alternate masking strategies and demonstrate that these changes have minimal impact on the BAO measurements with both DESI data and synthetic data. This includes when we mask the BAL features associated with emission lines outside of the forest region to minimize their contribution to redshift errors. We identify differences in the properties of BALs in the synthetic datasets relative to the observational data, as well as use the synthetic observations to characterize the completeness of the BAL identification algorithm, and demonstrate that incompleteness and differences in the BALs between real and synthetic data also do not impact the BAO results for the LyA forest.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Cosmological analysis of the DESI DR1 Lyman alpha 1D power spectrum

    astro-ph.CO 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DESI DR1 Lyman-alpha data yields Δ²★=0.379±0.032 and n★=-2.309±0.019 at k★=0.009 km⁻¹s and z=3, sharpening N_eff, α_s, and β_s constraints by factors of 1.18-1.90 when combined with other probes.

  2. DESI DR2 Results II: Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Constraints

    astro-ph.CO 2025-03 accept novelty 7.0

    DESI DR2 BAO data exhibits 2.3 sigma tension with CMB in Lambda-CDM but prefers evolving dark energy (w0 > -1, wa < 0) at 3.1 sigma with CMB and 2.8-4.2 sigma when including supernovae.

  3. Lyman-$\alpha$ forest holography: 3D predictions from 1D measurements

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    One-dimensional Lyman-α forest power spectrum measurements, propagated through the ForestFlow emulator, predict three-dimensional clustering that matches DESI BAO and ACCEL-2 simulation results.

  4. DESI DR2 Results IV: Alcock-Paczy\'nski Measurements from the Lyman Alpha Forest and Cosmological Constraints

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    The full shape of DESI DR2 Lyman-alpha forest correlations constrains the distance ratio DM/DH at z=2.33 to 1.0%, twice as precise as BAO alone.

  5. DESI DR2 Results IV: Alcock-Paczy\'nski Measurements from the Lyman Alpha Forest and Cosmological Constraints

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    DESI DR2 Lyman-alpha forest full-shape correlations yield a 1% Alcock-Paczyński measurement at z=2.33 and 0.8% distance ratio constraints.

  6. DESI DR2 Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the Lyman Alpha Forest Multipoles

    astro-ph.CO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    A Legendre-multipole BAO analysis of the DESI DR2 Lyα forest yields αiso=0.9997±0.0096 and αAP=0.9986±0.0276, consistent with the baseline, using an unsmoothed positive-definite covariance.

  7. Validation of the DESI DR2 Ly$\alpha$ forest full-shape analysis

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    The DESI DR2 Lyman-alpha full-shape analysis passes validation for BAO and Alcock-Paczynski parameters on 400 mocks and blinded data, while f-sigma-8 is rejected due to a roughly 10% mock bias.

  8. DESI DR2 Results I: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the Lyman Alpha Forest

    astro-ph.CO 2025-03 accept novelty 4.0

    DESI DR2 delivers 0.65% precision BAO measurements from the LyA forest at z_eff=2.33, with D_H/r_d = 8.632 ± 0.098 ± 0.026 and D_M/r_d = 38.99 ± 0.52 ± 0.12.