Effect of Separate Initial Conditions on the Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest in Simulations

Understand

Using a set of high resolution simulations, we quantify the effect of species specific initial transfer functions on probes of the IGM via the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest.

• We focus on redshifts $2-6$, after H~{\sc i} reionization.
• We explore the effect of these initial conditions on measures of the thermal state of the low density IGM: the curvature, Doppler width cutoff, and Doppler width distribution.
• We also examine the matter and flux power spectrum, and potential consequences for constraints on warm dark matter models.