Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 498, Issue 2, Pages 1951-1962Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa2388
Keywords
methods: data analysis; galaxies: haloes; intergalactic medium; quasars: absorption lines
Categories
Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [757535]
- Fondazione Cariplo [2018-2329]
- BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants [ST/K00042X/1, ST/P002293/1, ST/R002371/1, ST/S002502/1]
- Durham University
- STFC operations grant [ST/R000832/1]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
- Center for High-Performance Computing at the University of Utah
- STFC [ST/R000832/1, ST/M007065/1, ST/R00689X/1, ST/M006530/1, ST/K00042X/1, ST/P002447/1, ST/S002502/1, ST/T001550/1, ST/V002635/1, ST/R002371/1, ST/R000700/1, ST/J005673/1, ST/M007073/1, ST/R001006/1, ST/L000636/1, ST/P000673/1, ST/T001348/1, ST/V002384/1, ST/M007618/1, ST/K00333X/1, ST/M007006/1, ST/P002293/1, ST/S003762/1, ST/V002376/1, ST/R001049/1, ST/T00049X/1, ST/P003400/1, ST/S003916/1, ST/T001569/1, ST/T001372/1, ST/R001014/1, ST/M006948/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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We present a pipeline based on a random forest classifier for the identification of high column density clouds of neutral hydrogen (i.e. the Lyman limit systems, LLSs) in absorption within large spectroscopic surveys of z greater than or similar to 3 quasars. We test the performance of this method on mock quasar spectra that reproduce the expected data quality of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the WHT (William Herschel Telescope) Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer surveys, finding greater than or similar to 90 per cent completeness and purity for N-HI greater than or similar to 10(17.2) cm(-2) LLSs against quasars of g < 23 mag at z approximate to 3.5-3.7. After training and applying our method on 10 000 quasar spectra at z approximate to 3.5-4.0 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Data Release 16), we identify approximate to 6600 LLSs with N-HI greater than or similar to 10(17.5) cm(-2) between z approximate to 3.1 and 4.0 with a completeness and purity of greater than or similar to 90 per cent for the classification of LLSs. Using this sample, we measure a number of LLSs per unit redshift of l(z) = 2.32 +/- 0.08 at z = [3.3, 3.6]. We also present results on the performance of random forest for the measurement of the LLS redshifts and HI column densities, and for the identification of broad absorption line quasars.
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