Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Lyman Alpha Forest
  We use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations in a (600 Mpc)^3 volume to study
the observability of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the intergalactic
medium as probed by Lyman alpha forest (LAF) absorption. The large scale
separation between the wavelength of the BAO mode (~150 Mpc) and the size of
LAF absorbers (~100 kpc) makes this a numerically challenging problem. We
report on several 2048^3 simulations of the LAF using the ENZO code. We adopt
WMAP5 concordance cosmological parameters and power spectrum including BAO
perturbations. 5000 synthetic HI absorption line spectra are generated randomly
piercing the box face. We calculate the cross-correlation function between
widely separated pairs. We detect the BAO signal at z=3 where theory predicts
to moderate statistical significance.
