Understanding cosmological structure using galaxy and quaser surveys

The Lyman-alpha forest is a novel cosmological probe of the large sale structure of our universe that opens up a new window into the history of our universe at redshifts 1-3. This PhD project is at the intersection of cosmological observations and fundamental physical theories, focusing on analysing the Lyman-alpha data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), an ongoing experiment using the Sloan telescope that started in 2014, and is expected to finish taking data in 2019. One of the ways that eBOSS traces the cosmological density field is by using absorption features (known as the Ly-alpha forest) in the spectra of quasars to trace the distribution of neutral hydrogen along the intervening line-of-sight. This allows a single spectrum to be used to trace the density field at a series of points, and is a highly efficient way to map the Universe.