Jeans smoothing of the Lyα forest absorption lines
Abstract
We investigate a contribution of the Jeans smoothing to the minimal width of Lyα forest lines and discuss how the accounting for this additional broadening affects the inferred parameters of the intergalactic matter equation of state. We estimate a power-law index γ of the equation of state, a temperature at the mean density T0 and a hydrogen photoionization rate within 4 redshift bins. Furthermore, in each bin we obtain an upper limit on the scale-parameter f J, which sets the relation between the Jeans length and the characteristic physical size of the absorber clouds.
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