Simulations of BAO reconstruction with a quasar Lyman-alpha survey

Understand

The imprint of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) on the matter power spectrum can be constrained using the neutral hydrogen density in the intergalactic medium as a tracer of the matter density.

• One of the goals of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) is to derive the Hubble expansion rate and the angular scale from the BAO signal in the IGM.
• To this aim, the Lyman-alpha forest of 10^5 quasars will be observed in the redshift range 2.2<z<3.5 and over 10,000 deg^2.
• We simulated the BOSS QSO survey to estimate the statistical accuracy on the BAO scale determination provided by such a large scale survey.