# The Lyman Alpha Forest in Hierarchical Cosmologies

## Introduction

A physical picture of the Ly$`\alpha `$ forest in hierarchical cosmologies has recently emerged from numerical simulations sims ; bryan  in which the absorbers that give rise to low column density lines ($`N_{HI}<10^{15}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup> at $`z3`$) are large, unvirialized objects with sizes of $`100`$ kpc and densities comparable to the cosmic mean. Since the absorbers grow from the primordial density fluctuations through gravitational amplification, statistics of the forest may be used to test various models of structure formation. We discuss the numerical stability of the statistics against changes in simulation box size and spatial resolution in detail elsewhere. bryan  We focus here on examples from our model comparison study machacek  in which statistics of the Ly$`\alpha `$ forest are computed in five cosmological models: the standard cold dark matter model (SCDM), a flat cold dark matter model with nonvanishing cosmological constant (LCDM), a low density cold dark matter model (OCDM), a flat cold dark matter model with a tilted power spectrum (TCDM), and a critical model with both cold dark matter and two massive neutrinos (CHDM). The initial fluctuations, assumed to be Gaussian, are normalized using $`\sigma _{8h^1}`$ to agree with the observed distribution of clusters of galaxies, although all but SCDM are also consistent with the COBE measurements of the cosmic microwave background. By varying $`\sigma _{8h^1}`$ within a given model (SCDM), we also investigate the dependence of the statistics on changes in the fluctuation power spectrum.

The simulation technique uses a particle-mesh algorithm to follow the dark matter and the piecewise parabolic method bryan95  to simulate gas dynamics. The simulation box length is $`9.6`$ Mpc (comoving) with spatial resolution of $`18.75h^1`$ ($`37.5h^1`$) kpc for the model (power) comparison studies, respectively. Nonequilibrium effects are followed anninos  for six particle species (HI, HII, HeI, HeII, HeIII, and the electron density). We assume a spatially-constant radiation field computed from the observed QSO distribution haardt  which reionizes the universe around $`z6`$ and peaks at $`z2`$. Synthetic spectra are generated along $`300`$ random lines of sight through the volume, including the effects of peculiar velocity and thermal broadening. The spectra are normalized to give a mean optical depth $`<\tau >=0.3`$ at $`z=3`$ to agree with observation. We do not include the effects of radiative transfer, self-shielding or star formation and so can not address the physics of the highest column density absorbers ($`N_{HI}>10^{16}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup>).

## Fit Dependent Statistics

The synthetic spectra are fit by Voigt profiles at these low column densities to obtain column densities and Doppler widths for each line. The slope of the column density distribution is insensitive to changes in the size of the simulation volume or grid resolution. bryan  Fig. 1 confirms analytic work gnedin  that the slope of the column density distribution depends primarily on the power in the model at scales $`100200`$ kpc and steepens for models with lower power. Each of the five cosmologies in our comparison study agrees with the data at the $`3\sigma `$ level, although models (SCDM,LCDM,OCDM) with moderate power at these scales are favored.

The Doppler $`b`$ parameter distributions are determined not only by thermal broadening and peculiar velocities of the absorbers, but also by the Hubble expansion across their width, and require high spatial resolution to be modeled properly. bryan ; theuns  The shape of the distribution including the high $`b`$ tail is well fit by hierarchical models. However, as shown in Fig. 2, observations by Kim, et. al kim  yield median $`b`$ parameters significantly higher than predicted for the models favored by the column density distributions (LCDM, OCDM, SCDM).

## Conclusion

Although hierarchical cosmologies reproduce the general characteristics of the Ly$`\alpha `$ absorption spectra quite well, detailed tests of the models may require new methods of analysis for the simulations and observations. Statistics derived directly from the flux or optical depth distributions without recourse to any line fitting algorithm are particularly interesting.rauch  For example, the optical depth probability distribution, like the column density distribution, is stable to changes in simulation spatial resolution. Fig. 3 shows that the distribution narrows for models with lower power and that the shape of the distribution varies significantly for the different models over the range $`0.05<\tau <4`$ accessible to observations. Comparison of high quality observations with high resolution simulations using an ensemble of such statistics may soon clarify the physical properties of the intergalactic medium at intermediate redshifts when galaxies were young.

This work is done under the auspices of the Grand Challenge Cosmology Consortium and supported in part by NSF grant ASC-9318185 and NASA Astrophysics Theory Program grant NAG5-3923.