An Intensity Mapping Constraint on the CO-Galaxy Cross Power Spectrum at Redshift ~ 3

Understand

The abundance of cold molecular gas plays a crucial role in models of galaxy evolution.

• While deep spectroscopic surveys of CO emission lines have been a primary tool for measuring this abundance, the difficulty of these observations has motivated alternative approaches to studying molecular gas content.
• One technique, line intensity mapping, seeks to constrain the average molecular gas properties of large samples of individually undetectable galaxies through the CO brightness power spectrum.
• Here we present constraints on the cross-power spectrum between CO intensity maps and optical galaxy catalogs.