Carbon monoxide and ionized carbon line emission global signals: foregrounds and targets for absolute microwave spectrometry

TL;DR

Future microwave spectrometers like PIXIE could effectively measure the global CO and [CII] signals, providing insights into galaxy evolution, metallicity, and molecular gas across cosmic history, despite foreground challenges.

Contribution

This work forecasts the potential of future microwave spectrometers to detect and analyze the cosmic CO and [CII] signals, highlighting their role in understanding galaxy evolution and foreground mitigation.

Findings

Microwave spectrometers can constrain metallicity and molecular gas evolution.

Spectrometers can measure temperature and gas density with 10% to 1% accuracy.

Foregrounds can mimic spectral distortions, affecting parameter estimation.

Abstract

(abr.) We consider the potential of future microwave spectrometers akin to PIXIE in light of the sky-averaged global signal expected from the total intensity of extragalactic carbon monoxide (CO) and ionized carbon ([CII]) line emission. We start from models originally developed for forecasts of line-intensity mapping (LIM) observations targeting the same line emission at specific redshifts, extrapolating them across all of cosmic time. We then calculate Fisher forecasts for uncertainties on parameters describing relic spectral deviations, the CO/[CII] global signal, and a range of other Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds considered in previous work. We find that the measurement of the CO/[CII] global signal with a future CMB spectrometer presents an exciting opportunity to constrain the evolution of metallicity and molecular gas in galaxies across cosmic time. From PIXIE to its enhanced version, SuperPIXIE, microwave spectrometers would have the fundamental sensitivity to constrain the redshift evolution of average kinetic temperature and cosmic molecular gas density at a level of 10% to 1%, respectively. Taking a spectral distortion-centric perspective, when combined with other foregrounds, sky-averaged CO/[CII] emission can mimic $\mu$- and to a lesser extent $y$-type distortions. Under fiducial parameters, marginalising over the CO/[CII] model parameters increases the error on $\mu$ by $\simeq86$%, and the error on $y$ by $\simeq10$%. Incorporating information from planned CO LIM surveys can recover some of this loss in precision. Future work should deploy a more general treatment of the microwave sky to quantify in more detail the potential synergies between PIXIE-like and CO LIM experiments, which complement each other strongly in breadth versus depth, and ways to optimise both spectrometer and LIM surveys to improve foreground cleaning and maximise the science return for each.