Probing Time-Dependent Dark Energy With The Flux Power Spectrum Of The Ly Alpha Forest

We present new simulations of the flux power spectrum of the Ly alpha forest as a means to investigate the effects of time-dependent dark energy on structure formation. We use a linearized parameterization of the time-dependence of the dark energy equation of state and sample the parameters (w(0), w(a)) from the extrema of the allowed observational values as determined by the Planck results. Each chosen (w(0), w(a)) pair is then used in a high-resolution, large-scale cosmological simulation run with a modified version of the publicly available SPH code GADGET-2. From each of these simulations we extract synthetic Ly alpha forest spectra and calculate the flux power spectrum. We use the k-sample Anderson-Darling test to analyze the effects of dark energy on the Ly alpha forest. We compare each dark energy power spectrum to that due to a cosmological constant power spectrum. We find, however, that there is only a marginal effect of the choice of allowed dark energy models on the flux power spectrum.