Title: Emission Tomography of the Cosmic Web at Cosmic Noon
Abstract:Deep integral-field and narrowband surveys now detect faint, extended Lyman-alpha (Lyα) emission from the circumgalactic medium and, increasingly, from diffuse gas in cosmic filaments. I will review recent measurements and their interpretation, highlighting how galaxy and gas physics, as well as radiative transfer, complicate the mapping from surface brightness to gas density and kinematics. I will then discuss how modern galaxy formation simulations, coupled to Lyα radiative transfer calculations, are being used to build forward models for large-volume surveys. Finally, I will present first steps toward physics-informed emission tomography: inference and reconstruction methods that connect simulations and observations of the gas and galaxy distribution, enabled by differentiable simulators.