English

Tracing Large-Scale Structure Morphology with Multiwavelength Line Intensity Maps

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-03-30 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

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 2121-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 2121-cm and CO(101-0) 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(101-0) map exhibits an increased filamentary behaviour and larger contribution from sheets than the 2121-cm map. We attempt to explain such an emission of the CO(101-0) line from biased environments. The upcoming SKA-Mid will produce tomographic intensity maps of the 2121-cm signal at z3z \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 50\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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.09112,
  title  = {Tracing Large-Scale Structure Morphology with Multiwavelength Line Intensity Maps},
  author = {Manas Mohit Dosibhatla and Suman Majumdar and Chandra Shekhar Murmu and Samit Kumar Pal and Saswata Dasgupta and Satadru Bag and Abhirup Datta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.09112},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

30 pages, 12 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:46:35.872Z