Simulating the Lyman Alpha Forest

Abstract

In this paper we review the importance of the Lyman alpha forest as a probe of structure formation in the universe. We first discuss the statistics used to describe the Lyman alpha forest and the numerical techniques used to produce simulated spectra of the forest from a given cosmological model. We then discuss the physical picture of the absorbing structures that emerges from these numerical simulations. Finally, we comment on how two of the statistics, the slope of the column density distribution and the b parameter distribution, may be used to constrain competing cosmologies.

9 pages, 3 figures, Latex, uses epsf.sty, sprocl.sty, to appear in the Proceedings of PASCOS-98, Sixth International Symposium on Particles, Strings and Cosmology, Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA, March 22 - 27, 1998, ed. Pran Nath (World Scientific, Singapore)