Direct correlation of line intensity mapping and CMB lensing from evolution along the lightcone

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shen, Delon, Kokron, Nickolas, Schaan, Emmanuel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909991281098752
author Shen, Delon
Kokron, Nickolas
Schaan, Emmanuel
author_facet Shen, Delon
Kokron, Nickolas
Schaan, Emmanuel
contents Line intensity mapping (LIM) promises to probe previously inaccessible corners of the faint and high-redshift universe. However, confusion with bright foregrounds is a major challenge for current-era pathfinder LIM experiments. Cross-correlation with cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing is a promising avenue to enable the first LIM detections at high redshifts, a pristine probe of fundamental physics but sparsely populated by faint galaxies, and to further probe the connection between matter and spectral line emission, expanding our understanding of galaxies and the IGM. Previous works have suggested that this direct correlation between LIM and CMB lensing is effectively impossible because smoothly varying modes in the intensity map are lost to bright foregrounds. In this work, we analytically revisit the direct correlation of foreground-filtered line intensity mapping with CMB lensing, highlighting lightcone evolution's previously neglected yet unavoidable and crucial effects. Indeed, the growth of structure and evolution of line emission along the lightcone breaks statistical translational invariance and thus induces mode coupling, even in linear theory, which enables the recovery of the smoothly varying modes lost to bright foregrounds. We compute the effects of these lightcone evolution-induced mode couplings on the LIMxCMB lensing cross-spectrum detectability, predicting that future wider-sky versions of COMAP and CCAT will be able to precisely measure this cross-correlation. Although we focus on the direct correlation of LIM with CMB lensing in this paper, our arguments generalize to the direct correlation of LIM with any projected field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17752
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Direct correlation of line intensity mapping and CMB lensing from evolution along the lightcone
Shen, Delon
Kokron, Nickolas
Schaan, Emmanuel
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Line intensity mapping (LIM) promises to probe previously inaccessible corners of the faint and high-redshift universe. However, confusion with bright foregrounds is a major challenge for current-era pathfinder LIM experiments. Cross-correlation with cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing is a promising avenue to enable the first LIM detections at high redshifts, a pristine probe of fundamental physics but sparsely populated by faint galaxies, and to further probe the connection between matter and spectral line emission, expanding our understanding of galaxies and the IGM. Previous works have suggested that this direct correlation between LIM and CMB lensing is effectively impossible because smoothly varying modes in the intensity map are lost to bright foregrounds. In this work, we analytically revisit the direct correlation of foreground-filtered line intensity mapping with CMB lensing, highlighting lightcone evolution's previously neglected yet unavoidable and crucial effects. Indeed, the growth of structure and evolution of line emission along the lightcone breaks statistical translational invariance and thus induces mode coupling, even in linear theory, which enables the recovery of the smoothly varying modes lost to bright foregrounds. We compute the effects of these lightcone evolution-induced mode couplings on the LIMxCMB lensing cross-spectrum detectability, predicting that future wider-sky versions of COMAP and CCAT will be able to precisely measure this cross-correlation. Although we focus on the direct correlation of LIM with CMB lensing in this paper, our arguments generalize to the direct correlation of LIM with any projected field.
title Direct correlation of line intensity mapping and CMB lensing from evolution along the lightcone
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17752