Tracing Large-Scale Structure Morphology with Multiwavelength Line Intensity Maps

TL;DR

This paper investigates the large-scale structure of the universe using multiwavelength line intensity maps, analyzing the connectivity and morphology of cosmic web features through simulations and forecasts for SKA-Mid observations.

Contribution

It introduces a morphological analysis of simulated HI and CO line intensity maps, highlighting differences in filamentary and sheet-like structures and providing forecasts for SKA-Mid observations.

Findings

CO maps show more filamentary and sheet-like structures than 21-cm maps.

The study forecasts the recovery of local dimensions in noisy SKA-Mid data.

Differences in emission environments explain the CO line's biased emission patterns.

Abstract

Line intensity mapping (LIM) is an emerging technique for probing the large-scale structure (LSS) in the post-reionisation era. This captures the integrated flux of a particular spectral line emission from multiple sources within a patch of the sky without resolving them. Mapping different galaxy line emissions, such as the HI $21$-cm and CO rotational lines via LIM, can reveal complementary information about the bias with which the line emitters trace the underlying matter distribution and how different astrophysical phenomena affect the clustering pattern of these signals. The stage at which the structures in the "cosmic web" merge to form a single connected structure is known as the percolation transition. Using mock HI $21$-cm and CO($1-0$) LIM signals in the post-reionisation universe, we explore the connectivity of structures through percolation analysis and compare it with the underlying galaxy distribution. We probe the relative contributions of voids, filaments, and sheets to the galaxy density and line intensity maps using a morphological measure known as the local dimension. The CO($1-0$) map exhibits an increased filamentary behaviour and larger contribution from sheets than the $21$-cm map. We attempt to explain such an emission of the CO($1-0$) line from biased environments. The upcoming SKA-Mid will produce tomographic intensity maps of the $21$-cm signal at $z \lesssim 3$ in Band-1. CO maps can be produced at these redshifts in phase 2 of SKA-Mid, where the frequency coverage is expected to increase up to $\sim 50$ GHz. We present forecasts for the recovery of the local dimensions of these line intensity maps contaminated by thermal noise and line interlopers in SKA-Mid surveys.