# Probing Time-Dependent Dark Energy with the Flux Power Spectrum of the Lyman $\alpha$ Forest

## TL;DR

This study uses simulations of the Lyman alpha forest flux power spectrum to explore how time-dependent dark energy models influence cosmic structure formation, finding only marginal effects compared to a cosmological constant.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation-based approach to assess the impact of time-dependent dark energy on the Lyman alpha forest flux power spectrum.

## Key findings

- Dark energy models have a marginal effect on the flux power spectrum.
- Simulations show minimal differences between dynamic dark energy and cosmological constant models.
- The flux power spectrum is not highly sensitive to the specific dark energy parameterization.

## Abstract

We present new simulations of the flux power spectrum of the Lyman $\alpha$ forest as a means to investigate the effects of time-dependent dark energy on structure formation. We use a linearized parameterization of the time-dependence of the dark energy equation of state and sample the parameters ($w_0,w_a$) from the the extrema of the allowed observational values as determined by the Planck results. Each chosen ($w_0,w_a$) pair is then used in a high-resolution, large-scale cosmological simulation run with a modified version of the publicly available SPH code {\tt GADGET-2}. From each of these simulations we extract synthetic Lyman $\alpha$ forest spectra and calculate the flux power spectrum. We use the k-sample Anderson-Darling test to analyze the effects of dark energy on the Lyman $\alpha$ forest. We compare each dark energy power spectrum to that due to a cosmological constant power spectrum. We find, however, that there is only a marginal effect of the choice of allowed dark energy models on the flux power spectrum.