Mapping the Universe with the Lyman alpha forest

The study of the large scale structure of the Universe can answer some of the most important and challenging questions in physics: the nature of the dark energy causing the acceleration of the Universe; the inflationary origin of the density fluctuations; the physical properties of the dark matter component; and the number of neutrino species and their mass. A novel and exciting approach is to study this structure by looking at the distribution of intergalactic gas as seen in absorption features in the spectra of very high redshift quasars, a phenomenon known as the Lyman alpha forest. The goal of this project is to develop a theoretical framework to model the clustering of the Lyman alpha forest, and compare the predictions to recent and future observations from different international surveys (mainly BOSS and DESI) to provide new insights on dark energy, the nature of dark matter, the mass of the neutrinos and the initial stages of the Universe.