Intensity Mapping Foreground Cleaning with Generalized Needlet Internal Linear Combination

Abstract

AbstractIntensity mapping (IM) is a new observational technique to survey the large-scale structure of matter using spectral emission lines. IM observations are contaminated by instrumental noise and astrophysical foregrounds. The foregrounds are at least three orders of magnitude larger than the searched signals. In this work, we apply the Generalized Needlet Internal Linear Combination (GNILC) method to subtract radio foregrounds and to recover the cosmological HI and CO signals within the IM context. For the HI IM case, we find that GNILC can reconstruct the HI plus noise power spectra with 7.0% accuracy forz= 0.13 − 0.48 (960 − 1260 MHz) and ℓ ≲ 400, while for the CO IM case, we find that it can reconstruct the CO plus noise power spectra with 6.7% accuracy forz= 2.4 − 3.4 (26 − 34 GHz) and ℓ ≲ 3000.