CONCERTO : Extracting the power spectrum of the [CII] emission line

Context. CONCERTO is the first experiment to perform a [CII] line intensity mapping (LIM) survey on the COSMOS field to target z > 5.2. Measuring the [CII] angular power spectrum allows us to study the role of dusty star-forming galaxies in the star formation history during the epochs of Reionization and post-Reionization. The main obstacle to this measurement is the contamination by bright foregrounds: the dust continuum emission and atomic and molecular lines from foreground galaxies at z ≲ 3. Aims. We evaluate our ability to retrieve the [CII] signal in mock observations of the sky using the Simulated Infrared Dusty Extragalactic Sky (SIDES), which covers the mid-infrared to millimetre range. We also measure the impact of field-to-field variance on the residual foreground contamination. Methods. We compared two methods for dealing with the dust continuum emission from galaxies (i.e. the cosmic infrared background fluctuations): the standard principal component analysis (PCA) and the asymmetric re-weighted penalized least-squares (arPLS) method. For line interlopers, the strategy relies on masking low-redshift galaxies using the instrumental beam profile and external catalogues. As we do not have observations of CO or deep-enough classical CO proxies (such as LIR), we relied on the COSMOS stellar mass catalogue, which we demonstrate to be a reliable CO proxy for masking. To measure the angular power spectrum of masked data, we adapted the P of K EstimatoR (POKER) from cosmic infrared background studies and discuss its use on LIM data. Results. The arPLS method achieves a reduction in the cosmic infrared background fluctuations to a sub-dominant level of the [CII] power at z ∼ 7, a factor of > 70 below our fiducial [CII] model. When using the standard PCA, this factor is only 0.7 at this redshift. The masking lowers the power amplitude of line contamination down to 2 × 10−2 Jy2 sr−1. This residual level is dominated by faint undetected sources that are not cl