A Measurement of Small-scale Structure in the 2.2 <= Z <= 4.2 Ly Alpha Forest

Abstract

The amplitude of fluctuations in the Ly alpha forest on small spatial scales is sensitive to the temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM) and its spatial fluctuations. The temperature of the IGM and its spatial variations contain important information about hydrogen and helium reionization. We present a new measurement of the small-scale structure in the Ly alpha forest from 40 high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio, VLT spectra for absorbing gas at redshifts between 2.2 &lt;= z &lt;= 4.2. We convolve each Ly alpha forest spectrum with a suitably chosen Morlet wavelet filter, which allows us to extract the amount of small-scale structure in the forest as a function of position across each spectrum. We monitor contamination from metal line absorbers. We present a first comparison of these measurements with high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of the Ly alpha forest that track more than 2 billion particles. This comparison suggests that the IGM temperature close to the cosmic mean density (T-0) peaks at a redshift near z = 3.4, at which point it is greater than 20,000 K at greater than or similar to 2 sigma confidence. The temperature at lower redshift is consistent with the fall-off expected from adiabatic cooling (T-0 alpha (1 + z)(2)), after the peak temperature is reached near z = 3.4. In our highest redshift bin, centered around z = 4.2, the results favor a temperature of T-0 = 15-20,000 K. However, owing mostly to uncertainties in the mean transmitted flux at this redshift, a cooler IGM model with T-0 = 10,000 K is only disfavored at the 2 sigma level here, although such cool IGM models are strongly discrepant with the z approximate to 3-3.4 measurement. We do not detect large spatial fluctuations in the IGM temperature at any redshift covered by our data set. The simplest interpretation of our measurements is that He II reionization completes sometime near z approximate to 3.4, although statistical uncertainties are still large. Our method can be fruitfully combined with future He II Ly alpha forest measurements.