Open AccessCorrelation between the mean matter density and the width of the saturated Ly α absorption
Author(s) -
Zhan Hu
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-8711.2003.06883.x
Subject(s) - physics , scaling , spectral density , inversion (geology) , gaussian , astrophysics , maximum density , computational physics , statistical physics , thermodynamics , statistics , geometry , quantum mechanics , paleontology , mathematics , structural basin , biology
We report a scaling of the mean matter density with the width of the saturated Lyα absorptions. This property is established using the ‘pseudo‐hydro’ technique (Croft et al.). It provides a constraint for the inversion of the Lyα forest, which encounters difficulty in the saturated region. With a Gaussian density profile and the scaling relation, a simple inversion of the simulated Lyα forests shows that the one‐dimensional mass power spectrum is well recovered on scales above 2 h −1 Mpc , or roughly k ≲ 0.03 km −1 s , at z = 3 . The recovery underestimates the power on small scales, but improvement is possible with a more sophisticated algorithm.