LyMAS: PREDICTING LARGE-SCALE Lyα FOREST STATISTICS FROM THE DARK MATTER DENSITY FIELD

We describe Lyα Mass Association Scheme (LyMAS), a method of predicting clustering statistics in the Lyα forest on large scales from moderate-resolution simulations of the dark matter (DM) distribution, with calibration from high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of smaller volumes. We use the "Horizon-MareNostrum" simulation, a 50 h –1 Mpc comoving volume evolved with the adaptive mesh hydrodynamic code RAMSES, to compute the conditional probability distribution P(Fs |δ s ) of the transmitted flux Fs , smoothed (one-dimensionally, 1D) over the spectral resolution scale, on the DM density contrast δ s , smoothed (three-dimensionally, 3D) over a similar scale. In this study we adopt the spectral resolution of the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) at z = 2.5, and we find optimal results for a DM smoothing length σ = 0.3 h –1 Mpc (comoving). In its simplest form, LyMAS draws randomly from the hydro-calibrated P(Fs |δ s ) to convert DM skewers into Lyα forest pseudo-spectra, which are then used to compute cross-sightline flux statistics. In extended form, LyMAS exactly reproduces both the 1D power spectrum and one-point flux distribution of the hydro simulation spectra. Applied to the MareNostrum DM field, LyMAS accurately predicts the two-point conditional flux distribution and flux correlation function of the full hydro simulation for transverse sightline separations as small as 1 h –1 Mpc, including redshift-space distortion effects. It is substantially more accurate than a deterministic density-flux mapping ("Fluctuating Gunn-Peterson Approximation"), often used for large-volume simulations of the forest. With the MareNostrum calibration, we apply LyMAS to 10243 N-body simulations of a 300 h –1 Mpc and 1.0 h –1 Gpc cube to produce large, publicly available catalogs of mock BOSS spectra that probe a large comoving volume. LyMAS will be a powerful tool for interpreting 3D Lyα forest data, thereby transforming measurements from BOSS and other massive quasar absorption surveys into constraints on dark energy, DM, space geometry, and intergalactic medium physics.