The impact of AGN feedback on the 1D power spectra from the Ly α forest using the Horizon-AGN suite of simulations

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Lyman-α forest is a powerful probe for cosmology, but it is also strongly impacted by galaxy evolution and baryonic processes such as active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback, which can redistribute mass and energy on large scales. We constrain the signatures of AGN feedback on the 1D power spectrum of the Lyman-α forest using a series of eight hydro-cosmological simulations performed with the adaptive mesh refinement code ramses. This series starts from the Horizon-AGN simulation and varies the subgrid parameters for AGN feeding, feedback, and stochasticity. These simulations cover the whole plausible range of feedback and feeding parameters according to the resulting galaxy properties. AGNs globally suppress the Lyman-α power at all scales. On large scales, the energy injection and ionization dominate over the supply of gas mass from AGN-driven galactic winds, thus suppressing power. On small scales, faster cooling of denser gas mitigates the suppression. This effect increases with decreasing redshift. We provide lower and upper limits of this signature at nine redshifts between z = 4.25 and 2.0, making it possible to account for it at post-processing stage in future work given that running simulations without AGN feedback can save considerable amounts of computing resources. Ignoring AGN feedback in cosmological inference analyses leads to strong biases with 2 per cent shift on σ8 and 1 per cent shift on ns, which represents twice the standards deviation of the current constraints on ns.