Kavli Affiliate: Martin Haehnelt
| Summary:
We present the first constraints on primordial magnetic fields from the Lyman-$α$ forest using full cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. At the scales and redshifts probed by the data, the flux power spectrum is extremely sensitive to the extra power induced by primordial magnetic fields in the linear matter power spectrum, at a scale that we parametrize with $k_rm peak$. We rely on a set of more than a quarter million flux models obtained by varying thermal, reionization histories and cosmological parameters. We find a hint of extra power that is well fitted by the PMF model with $Bsim 0.2$ nG, corresponding to $k_rm peaksim 20$ Mpc$^-1$. However, when applying very conservative assumptions on the modelling of the noise, we obtain a 3$σ$ C.L. lower limit $k_rm peak> 30$ Mpc$^-1$ which translates into the tightest bounds on the strength of primordial intergalactic magnetic fields: $B < 0.30$ nG (for fixed, nearly scale-invariant $n_rm B=-2.9$).
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