Abstract

The Lyman-alpha Forest is an important probe of the inter-galactic medium (IGM), which comprises >90% of baryons at high redshifts and is the reservoir for galaxy formation. At z<3, HeII reionization is predicted to be the dominant process in regulating the properties of the IGM. I will introduce a new statistic, the threshold clustering functions, which can detect thermal inhomogeneities from HeII reionization when applied to SDSS data. I will also discuss some of the systematics involved, and quantify the ability of this statistic to distinguish between different toy models of the IGM.

Presentation

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