NIKA2 Cosmological Legacy Survey. First measurement of the confusion noise at the IRAM 30 m telescope

TL;DR

This paper measures the confusion noise at the IRAM 30m telescope using deep NIKA2 observations, providing new insights into the limits of detecting faint dusty galaxies and introducing a novel estimator for confusion noise.

Contribution

It presents the first measurement of confusion noise at the IRAM 30m telescope and introduces a new cross variance estimator for assessing confusion noise and its correlation between bands.

Findings

Confusion noise at 1.2mm is approximately 139 μJy/beam.

Confusion noise at 2mm is approximately 39 μJy/beam.

The results align with predictions from the SIDES model.

Abstract

The NIKA2 Cosmological Legacy Survey (N2CLS) is a large programme using the NIKA2 dual-band camera on the IRAM 30\,m telescope. Its goal is to improve our understanding of the physics of distant Dusty Star Forming Galaxies (DSFGs) by carrying out deep surveys of two fields, GOODS-North and COSMOS. This work is focussed on GOODS-North, which was observed for 78.2 hours, simultaneously at 1.2 and 2\,mm, with a field of view of $\sim$240\,arcmin$^2$. With such a deep integration, we were able to measure, for the first time, the confusion noise limits at the 30\,m telescope using the best sampled $\sim 62$\,arcmin$^2$ and masking sources with a flux greater than 0.54 or 0.17\,mJy at 1.2 or 2\,mm, respectively. We found a confusion noise of $139.1^{+ 15.9}_{- 19.2}\pm11.9$\,$\mu$Jy/beam at 1.2\,mm and $38.6^{+ 9.6}_{- 13.1} \pm3.7$\,$\mu$Jy/beam at 2\,mm (the first uncertainty is statistical, the second is the cosmic variance). In this region, this corresponds to half the instrumental noise. To derive these estimates, we devised a novel estimator, referred to as the cross variance, which also enabled us to estimate the correlated confusion noise between the two bands. Thus, we obtained a result of $49.6^{+ 15.9}_{- 24.8}\pm 6.4$\,$\mu$Jy/beam. These values are consistent with the state of the art Simulated Infrared Dusty Extragalactic Sky (SIDES) model.