Tracing Large Scale Structure with the Lyman alpha Forest

Andreu Font
(LBL)

Abstract:

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) uses the SDSS telescope to obtain spectra of 1.5 million galaxies to get very accurate measurements of the BAO scale at redshift z ~0.5. Roughly 20% of the fibers of the spectrograph, however, are pointing to high redshift quasars with the goal of detecting the BAO in the clustering of gas responsible for the Lyman alpha absorption present in the quasar spectra, known as the Lyman alpha forest.

In this talk, I will overview different studies that have recently used the Lyman alpha forest in BOSS to provide new constraints in the expansion history of the Universe, its geometry and matter content. Future Lyman alpha surveys (eBOSS, DESI) and interesting new projects will also be discussed.