PhD colloquium, location: Auditorium 0.02, MPIfR
Christos Karoumpis
Line Intensity Mapping the Epoch of Reionization with the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope
The very first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang can now be detected in small numbers with sensitive space telescope observations. Wide area surveys revealing their large-scale distribution and relation to the cosmic web are yet not feasible. However, line intensity mapping (LIM) offers a technique to map their distribution without resolving individual sources. In my work I forecast LIM observations of the [CII]158 μm carbon fine structure emission line with the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) that is currently deployed at 5600 meter altitude in Chile, a project Bonn has been a major partner in. At the angular resolution of 60 to 30 arcsec at 205 to 440 GHz of the 6-meter FYST aperture, LIM captures the cumulative emission from [CII] of galaxies at redshifts 3.4 to 8.3. The power spectrum of the 3-D tomographic data reveals their spatial clustering on scales above 300 kpc as well as their star formation properties. We model the [CII] power spectrum using the IllustrisTNG300 cosmological simulation. The detectability of the [CII] signal largely depends on our ability to model the overlying CO emission from lower-redshift galaxies. By masking known foreground galaxies we find that the [CII] signal can be recovered at redshift 3.4 to 4.8, while higher redshifts will require the development of more advanced mitigation strategies we currently work on.