COMAP Pathfinder -- Season 2 results IV. A stack on eBOSS/DESI quasars

TL;DR

This paper reports on the second season of COMAP Pathfinder observations targeting CO emission around quasars, setting upper limits and exploring environmental effects, with implications for galaxy formation studies.

Contribution

First detailed stacking analysis of COMAP data on eBOSS/DESI quasars, providing new upper limits and insights into CO emission in quasar environments.

Findings

No CO emission detected in the stack.

Upper limit of $10.0\times 10^{10}$ K km s$^{-1}$ pc$^2$ at 95% confidence.

Tentative tension with the brightest CO emission models.

Abstract

We present a stack of data from the second season of the CO Mapping Array Project (COMAP) Pathfinder on the positions of quasars from eBOSS and DESI. COMAP is a Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) experiment targeting dense molecular gas via CO(1--0) emission at $z\sim3$. COMAP's Season 2 represents a $3\times$ increase in map-level sensitivity over the previous Early Science data release. We do not detect any CO emission in the stack, instead finding an upper limit of $10.0\times 10^{10}\ \mathrm{K\ km\ s^{-1}\ pc^2}$ at 95\% confidence within an $\sim 18\ \mathrm{cMpc}$ box. We compare this upper limit to models of the CO emission stacked on quasars and find a tentative ($\sim 3 \sigma$) tension between the limit and the brightest stack models after accounting for a suite of additional sources of experimental attenuation and uncertainty, including quasar velocity uncertainty, pipeline signal loss, cosmic variance, and interloper emission in the LIM data. The COMAP-eBOSS/DESI stack is primarily a measurement of the CO luminosity in the quasars' wider environment and is therefore potentially subject to environmental effects such as feedback. With our current simple models of the galaxy-halo connection, we are thus unable to confidently rule out any models of cosmic CO with the stack alone. Conversely, the stack's sensitivity to these large-scale environmental effects has the potential to make it a powerful tool for galaxy formation science, once we are able to constrain the average CO luminosity via the auto power spectrum (a key goal of COMAP).