Compressed 3D Lyman- α forest bispectrum

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Authors: Roger de Belsunce, James M. Sullivan, Patrick McDonald
Cited by: 3
References: 133

Abstract

Cosmological studies of the Lyman-Alpha (Lya) forest typically constrain parameters using two-point statistics. However, higher-order statistics, such as the three-point function (or its Fourier counterpart, the bispectrum) offer additional information and help break the degeneracy between the mean flux and power spectrum amplitude, albeit at a significant computational cost. To address this, we extend an existing highly informative compression of the bispectrum, the skew spectra, to the Lya forest. We derive the tree-level bispectrum of Lya forest fluctuations in the framework of effective field theory (EFT) directly in redshift space and validate our methodology on synthetic Lya forest data. We measure the anisotropic cross-spectra between the transmitted flux fraction and all quadratic operators arising in the bispectrum, yielding a set of 26 skew spectra. Using idealized 3D Gaussian smoothing (R=10 Mpc/h), we find good agreement (1-2 sigma level based on the statistical errors of the mocks) with the theoretical tree-level bispectrum prediction for monopole and quadrupole up to k

Fields of Study & Subjects

Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics Advanced Data Compression Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Volume
113
Issue
6
Publication date
14 January 2026
Language
EN