A New Precision Measurement of the Small-Scale Line-of-Sight Power Spectrum of the Ly${\alpha}$ Forest

Understand

We present a new measurement of the Ly${\alpha}$ forest power spectrum at $1.8 < z < 3.4$ using 74 Keck/HIRES and VLT/UVES high-resolution, high-S/N quasar spectra.

• We developed a custom pipeline to measure the power spectrum and its uncertainty, which fully accounts for finite resolution and noise, and corrects for the bias induced by masking missing data, DLAs, and metal absorption lines.
• Our measurement results in unprecedented precision on the small-scale modes $k > 0.02\,\mathrm{s\,km^{-1}}$, unaccessible to previous SDSS/BOSS analyses.
• It is well known that these high-$k$ modes are highly sensitive to the thermal state of the intergalactic medium, however contamination by narrow metal lines is a significant concern.