Unveiling cosmological information on small scales with line intensity mapping

Understand

One of the toughest challenges in modern cosmology is to probe the small scales $k \sim 0.5\,$Mpc$^{-1}$ in the matter power spectrum and clustering.

• We show that such small scales will be accessible via upcoming line-intensity mapping surveys, with carbon monoxide (CO) emission from star-forming galaxies at high redshifts as an example.
• While these galaxies cannot be individually detected and the two-point correlations of the intensity fluctuation maps is not accessible at these scales, the voxel intensity distribution (VID) of the highly non-Gaussian intensity maps is sensitive to the integrated emission from faint sources.
• As we describe, the main limitations are due to uncertainties related with the halo mass function and the CO emission model.