The First Blind Survey of Intervening NaI Absorbers: Incidence and Cosmic Evolution with DESI — E8 Intelligence Research

We present the first blind statistical survey of intervening NaI absorbers over the last $\simeq3$~Gyr using quasar spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Data Release~1. We identify 3636 NaI D doublets at $0.01\lesssim z_{\rm abs}\lesssim0.27$ along 214,035 quasar sightlines. We quantify the survey selection function through end-to-end injection--recovery tests and estimate the residual contamination from visual inspection. The completeness reaches 50% at a rest-equivalent width of the NaI $\lambda5891$ line, $W_{5891}\simeq0.95$ Angstrom, and the catalog-weighted purity is $\simeq77\%$. For the fiducial sample with $0.95 Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com