Journal article
Fast, large-volume, GPU-enabled simulations for the Ly forest: Power spectrum forecasts for baryon acoustic oscillation experiments
B Greig, JS Bolton, JSB Wyithe
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Published : 2011
Abstract
High-redshift measurements of the baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale from large Lyα forest surveys represent the next frontier of dark energy studies. As part of this effort, efficient simulations of the BAO signature from the Lyα forest will be required. We construct a model for producing fast, large-volume simulations of the Lyα forest for this purpose. Utilizing a calibrated semi-analytic approach, we are able to run very large simulations in 1Gpc3 volumes which fully resolve the Jeans scale in less than a day on a desktop PC using a graphics processing unit enabled version of our code. The Lyα forest spectra extracted from our semi-analytical simulations are in excellent agreement..
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Funding Acknowledgements
BG acknowledges the support of the Australian Postgraduate Award. The Centre for All-sky Astrophysics is an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, funded by grant CE11E0090. We also thank Vincent Desjacques for providing his low-resolution Ly alpha PDF data, and Paul Geil for providing the initial conditions generation code. We would also like to thank Chris Blake and Matt McQuinn for comments on the draft manuscript.