Radiative Transfer Distortions of Lyman-$\alpha$ Emitters: a New Fingers-of-God Damping in the Clustering in Redshift Space

Understand

Complex radiative transfer (RT) of the Lyman-$\alpha$ photons poses a theoretical challenge to galaxy surveys which infer the large-scale structure with Lyman-$\alpha$ emitters (LAEs).

• Guided by RT simulations, prior studies investigated the impact of RT on the large-scale LAE clustering, and claimed that RT induces a selection effect which results in an anisotropic distortion even in real space but in an otherwise negligible effect in redshift space.
• However, our previous study, which relies on a full radiative transfer code run on the Illustris simulations, shows that the anisotropic selection effect was drastically reduced with higher spatial resolution.
• Adopting the same simulation framework, we further study the impact of RT on the LAE clustering in redshift space.