Empowering line intensity mapping to study early galaxies

Line intensity mapping is a superb tool to study the collective radiation from early galaxies. However, the method is hampered by the presence of strong foregrounds, mostly produced by low-redshift interloping lines. We present here a general method to overcome this problem which is robust against foreground residual noise and based on the cross-correlation function ψαL(r) between diffuse line emission and Lyα emitters (LAE). We compute the diffuse line (Lyα is used as an example) emission from galaxies in a (800 Mpc)3 box at z = 5.7 and 6.6. We divide the box in slices and populate them with 14 000(5500) LAEs at z = 5.7(6.6), considering duty cycles from 10−3 to 1. Both the LAE number density and slice volume are consistent with the expected outcome of the Subaru Hyper Suprime Cam survey. We add Gaussian random noise with variance σN up to 100 times the variance of the Lyα emission, σα, to simulate residual foregrounds and compute ψαL(r). We find that the signal-to-noise ratio of the observed ψαL(r) does not change significantly if σN ≤ 10σα and show that in these conditions the mean line intensity, ILyα, can be precisely recovered independently of the LAE duty cycle. Even if σN = 100σα, Iα can be constrained within a factor 2. The method works equally well for any other line (e.g. [C ii], He ii) used for the intensity-mapping experiment.