Ly-alpha forest and dark matter

The Ly-alpha forest is a feature of densely packed, narrow absorption lines bluewards the Ly-alpha absorption line in the spectra of distant quasars. It originates from the absorption by the intergalactic medium (IGM) in the line of sight between the background emitting source and the observe. Thus, the Ly-alpha forest traces the quasi-linear matter distribution in the Universe on small scales. The Ly-alpha forest is therefore well suited to study the cosmic structure formation and novel models of dark matter. However, among others, the observables become degenerate with the underlying matter density distribution, the temperature of the IGM and peculiar velocities. I am interested in solving these issues by a full inversion of the density distribution to provide an optimal extraction of the dark matter signal from the Ly-alpha forest, especially at highest spectral resolution, and to study the thermal history of the IGM.

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