Mapping the Universe with the Lyman alpha forest

研究宇宙的大尺度结构可以回答物理学中一些最重要和最具挑战性的问题：导致宇宙加速的暗能量的性质；密度涨落的膨胀起源；暗物质成分的物理性质；以及中微子种类及其质量的数量。一种新的和令人兴奋的方法是通过观察星系间气体的分布来研究这种结构，这种分布可以在极高红移类星体的光谱吸收特征中看到，这种现象被称为莱曼阿尔法森林。这个项目的目标是开发一个理论框架来模拟莱曼阿尔法森林的聚集，并将预测与不同国际调查(主要是BOSS和DESI)最近和未来的观测结果进行比较，以提供关于暗能量、暗物质的性质、中微子的质量和宇宙初始阶段的新见解。

The study of the large scale structure of the Universe can answer some of the most important and challenging questions in physics: the nature of the dark energy causing the acceleration of the Universe; the inflationary origin of the density fluctuations; the physical properties of the dark matter component; and the number of neutrino species and their mass. A novel and exciting approach is to study this structure by looking at the distribution of intergalactic gas as seen in absorption features in the spectra of very high redshift quasars, a phenomenon known as the Lyman alpha forest. The goal of this project is to develop a theoretical framework to model the clustering of the Lyman alpha forest, and compare the predictions to recent and future observations from different international surveys (mainly BOSS and DESI) to provide new insights on dark energy, the nature of dark matter, the mass of the neutrinos and the initial stages of the Universe.