2:30pm Monday November 16 in Curia II
In cosmologies where structure formation is driven by gravitational instability, simple physical processes govern the relationship between the mass density field and an observable quantity, the absorbed flux in the Lyman-alpha forest region of QSO spectra. With this knowledge, we can reconstruct statistical properties of the mass distribution and so constrain cosmology. I will describe a recent measurement of the power spectrum of mass fluctuations, resulting constraints on specific cosmological models, and a determination of the cosmological density parameter Omega. I will describe how Lyman-alpha forest physics can be combined with analytical theories of gravitational clustering, the ulimate aim being a test of gravitational instability theory and of the nature of the initial fluctuations.