Colloquium on Oct. 22, 2026

Lyα forest power spectrum as a new window into cosmic reionization

Speaker: Yi Mao (Tsinghua University)

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2111

Time: 16:00 PM, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026

Abstract:

The Lyα forest provides a powerful probe of the large-scale structure of the Universe, but the thermal state of the intergalactic gas retains a long-lived imprint of the epoch of reionization. We incorporate this “memory of reionization” effect into the modelling of Lyα forest correlations using a theoretically motivated, analytical template. Reanalysing DESI DR 1, we find decisive Bayesian evidence for this reionization memory over the standard no-memory model. Our physically constrained model infers a scenario of late reionization.