Reconstructing emission from pre-reionization sources with cosmic infrared background fluctuation measurements by the JWST

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new methodology using JWST/NIRCam to analyze cosmic infrared background fluctuations, aiming to probe high-redshift sources from 10<z<30 and distinguish their origins through Lyman-break tomography.

Contribution

It develops a novel Lyman-break tomography technique with JWST/NIRCam to study the emission history of the early universe during the Dark Ages.

Findings

CIB fluctuations can be used to probe sources at 10<z<30.

Current instruments are limited by galaxy contributions at visible wavelengths.

JWST will enable Lyman-break measurements to constrain early universe emissions.

Abstract

We present new methodology to use cosmic infrared background (CIB) fluctuations to probe sources at 10<z<30 from a JWST/NIRCam configuration that will isolate known galaxies to 28 AB mag at 0.5--5 micron. At present significant mutually consistent source-subtracted CIB fluctuations have been identified in the Spitzer and Akari data at 2--5 micron, but we demonstrate internal inconsistencies at shorter wavelengths in the recent CIBER data. We evaluate CIB contributions from remaining galaxies and show that the bulk of the high-z sources will be in the confusion noise of the NIRCam beam, requiring CIB studies. The accurate measurement of the angular spectrum of the fluctuations and probing the dependence of its clustering component on the remaining shot noise power would discriminate between the various currently proposed models for their origin and probe the flux distribution of its sources. We show that the contribution to CIB fluctuations from remaining galaxies is large at visible wavelengths for the current instruments precluding probing the putative Lyman-break of the CIB fluctuations. We demonstrate that with the proposed JWST configuration such measurements will enable probing the Lyman break. We develop a Lyman-break tomography method to use the NIRCam wavelength coverage to identify or constrain, via the adjacent two-band subtraction, the history of emissions over 10<z<30 as the Universe comes out of the 'Dark Ages'. We apply the proposed tomography to the current Spitzer/IRAC measurements at 3.6 and 4.5 micron, to find that it already leads to interestingly low upper limit on emissions at z>30.