1. A Detection of Cosmological 21 cm Emission from CHIME in Cross-correlation with eBOSS Measurements of the Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest
- Author
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CHIME Collaboration, Amiri, Mandana, Bandura, Kevin, Chakraborty, Arnab, Dobbs, Matt, Fandino, Mateus, Foreman, Simon, Gan, Hyoyin, Halpern, Mark, Hill, Alex S., Hinshaw, Gary, Höfer, Carolin, Landecker, T. L., Li, Zack, MacEachern, Joshua, Masui, Kiyoshi, Mena-Parra, Juan, Milutinovic, Nikola, Mirhosseini, Arash, Newburgh, Laura, Ordog, Anna, Paul, Sourabh, Pen, Ue-Li, Pinsonneault-Marotte, Tristan, Reda, Alex, Shaw, J. Richard, Siegel, Seth R., Vanderlinde, Keith, Wang, Haochen, Wiebe, D. V., and Wulf, Dallas
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics ,Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics - Abstract
We report the detection of 21 cm emission at an average redshift $\bar{z} = 2.3$ in the cross-correlation of data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) with measurements of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest from eBOSS. Data collected by CHIME over 88 days in the $400-500$~MHz frequency band ($1.8 < z < 2.5$) are formed into maps of the sky and high-pass delay filtered to suppress the foreground power, corresponding to removing cosmological scales with $k_\parallel \lesssim 0.13\ \text{Mpc}^{-1}$ at the average redshift. Line-of-sight spectra to the eBOSS background quasar locations are extracted from the CHIME maps and combined with the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest flux transmission spectra to estimate the 21 cm-Lyman-$\alpha$ cross-correlation function. Fitting a simulation-derived template function to this measurement results in a $9\sigma$ detection significance. The coherent accumulation of the signal through cross-correlation is sufficient to enable a detection despite excess variance from foreground residuals $\sim6-10$ times brighter than the expected thermal noise level in the correlation function. These results are the highest-redshift measurement of \tcm emission to date, and set the stage for future 21 cm intensity mapping analyses at $z>1.8$.
- Published
- 2023