A measurement of the Lyman-beta forest power spectrum and its cross with the Lyman-alpha forest in X-Shooter XQ-100

TL;DR

This paper measures the Lyman-beta forest power spectrum and its cross correlation with the Lyman-alpha forest to better constrain the IGM temperature-density relation and improve understanding of reionization processes.

Contribution

It introduces the first measurement of the Lyman-beta forest power spectrum and its cross correlation with Lyman-alpha, providing new insights into the IGM's thermal state at high redshift.

Findings

The Lyman-beta forest power spectrum is measured using X-Shooter data.

The cross correlation reveals a flattening of the temperature-density relation slope with decreasing redshift.

Results are consistent with models of HeII reionization and IGM thermal evolution.

Abstract

The Lyman-alpha forest is the large-scale structure probe for which we appear to have modeling control to the highest wavenumbers. This makes the Lyman-alpha forest of great interest for constraining the warmness/fuzziness of dark matter and the timing of reionization processes. However, the standard statistic, the Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum, is unable to strongly constrain the IGM temperature-density relation, and this inability further limits how well other high wavenumber-sensitive parameters can be constrained. With the aim of breaking these degeneracies, we measure the power spectrum of the Lyman-beta forest and its cross correlation with the coeval Lyman-alpha forest using the one hundred spectra of z=3.5-4.5 quasars in the VLT/X-Shooter XQ-100 Legacy Survey, motivated by the Lyman-beta transition's smaller absorption cross section that makes it sensitive to somewhat higher densities relative to the Lyman-alpha transition. Our inferences from this measurement for the IGM temperature-density relation appear to latch consistently onto the recent tight lower-redshift Lyman-alpha forest constraints. The z=3.4-4.7 trends we find using the Lyman-alpha$-$Lyman-beta cross correlation show a flattening of the slope of the temperature-density relation with decreasing redshift. This is the trend anticipated from ongoing HeII reionization and there being sufficient time to reach the asymptotic temperature-density slope after hydrogen reionization completes. Furthermore, our measurements provide a consistency check on IGM models that explain the Lyman-alpha forest, with the cross correlation being immune to systematics that are uncorrelated between the two forests, such as metal line contamination.