The Acoustic Peak in the Lyman Alpha Forest

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We present the first simulation of the signature of baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in Lyman alpha forest data containing 180,000 mock quasar sight-lines.

• We use eight large dark-matter only simulations onto which we paint the Lyman alpha field using the fluctuating Gunn-Peterson approximation.
• We argue that this approach should be sufficient for the mean signature on the scales of interest.
• Our results indicate that Lyman alpha flux provides a good tracer of the underlying dark matter field on large scales and that redshift space distortions are well described by a simple linear theory prescription.