Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Modeling the Lyman-alpha Forest in Collisionless Simulations

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1602.08099 v1 pith:LV52ZXQ3 submitted 2016-02-25 astro-ph.CO

classification astro-ph.CO
keywords simulationsforestlyman-alphaaccuratelydensityn-bodypowerspectrum
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations can accurately predict the properties of the intergalactic medium (IGM), but only under the condition of retaining high spatial resolution necessary to resolve density fluctuations in the IGM. This resolution constraint prohibits simulating large volumes, such as those probed by BOSS and future surveys, like DESI and 4MOST. To overcome this limitation, we present Iteratively Matched Statistics (IMS), a novel method to accurately model the Lyman-alpha forest with collisionless N-body simulations, where the relevant density fluctuations are unresolved. We use a small-box, high-resolution hydrodynamic simulation to obtain the probability distribution function (PDF) and the power spectrum of the real-space Lyman-alpha forest flux. These two statistics are iteratively mapped onto a pseudo-flux field of an N-body simulation, which we construct from the matter density. We demonstrate that our method can perfectly reproduce line-of-sight observables, such as the PDF and power spectrum, and accurately reproduce the 3D flux power spectrum (5-20%). We quantify the performance of the commonly used Gaussian smoothing technique and show that it has significantly lower accuracy (20-80%), especially for N-body simulations with achievable mean inter-particle separations in large-volume simulations. In addition, we show that IMS produces reasonable and smooth spectra, making it a powerful tool for modeling the IGM in large cosmological volumes and for producing realistic "mock" skies for Lyman-alpha forest surveys.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 33 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Modeling the Cosmological Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest at the Field Level

    astro-ph.CO 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    An effective-field-theory forward model reproduces the Lyman-alpha forest field from a hydrodynamic simulation at percent level, down to a few megaparsecs, using the same initial conditions.

  2. Fast(er)PM and Moving Mesh: JAX-native Geometric Multigrid Methods

    astro-ph.IM 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Warm-started Chebyshev geometric multigrid is competitive with distributed FFTs for FastPM and enables a differentiable moving-mesh particle–mesh gravity solver in JAX.

  3. Lyman-Alpha Forest and its Cross-Correlation with High-Redshift Galaxies in Effective Field Theory at the Field Level

    astro-ph.CO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    An EFT-based field-level forward model for the Lyman-alpha forest matches simulations at the percent level on quasi-linear scales and generates mocks for DESI and DESI-II analyses.

  4. Bridging Simulations and EFT: A Hybrid Model of the Lyman-Alpha Forest Field

    astro-ph.CO 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A hybrid EFT forward model using N-body displacements reproduces the simulated Lyman-alpha forest to 5% at k <= 1 h/Mpc with a white-noise residual.

  5. GREX-PLUS Science Book v2

    astro-ph.IM 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    GREX-PLUS is a proposed JAXA L-class mission with a 1m cooled telescope, wide-field 2-8um camera, and R=30000 spectrometer in 10-18um to enable studies of z>15 galaxies, protoplanetary snowlines, and related astrophysics.

  6. Machine Learning Techniques for Astrophysics and Cosmology: Lyman-$\alpha$ forest

    astro-ph.CO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    Review of machine learning applications for analyzing Lyman-alpha forest observations to probe cosmology, reionization, and dark matter.

Pith tools