On the measurement of kinetic temperature in high redshift galactic halos

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We consider the deconvolution of the thermal and the turbulent profiles for a pair of ions with different atomic weights under the condition that the lines are formed in an absorbing medium with fluctuating density and velocity fields. Our method is based on the entropy-regularized minimization (ERM) procedure. From synthetic spectra we found that the CII and SiII lines can be used to estimate the mean (density weighted) kinetic temperature with a sufficiently high accuracy (of about 10%) in a rather wide range of the ionization parameter, -6 < log U < -2. This is a generalization of a previous result (Levshakov, Takahara and Agafonova 1999) where we did not account for density fluctuations.