Empowering line intensity mapping to study early galaxies

Line intensity mapping is a superb tool to study the collective radiation from early galaxies. However, the method is hampered by the presence of strong foregrounds, mostly produced by low-redshift interloping lines. We present here a general method to overcome this problem which is robust against foreground residual noise and based on the cross-correlation function ${\psi }_{\alpha L}(r)$ between diffuse line emission and Ly$\alpha$ emitters (LAE). We compute the diffuse line (Ly$\alpha$ is used as an example) emission from galaxies in a $(800\mathrm{M}\mathrm{p}\mathrm{c}{)}^3$ box at $z=5.7$ and $6.6$. We divide the box in slices and populate them with $14000(5500)$ LAEs at $z=5.7(6.6)$, considering duty cycles from ${10}^{-3}$ to $1$. Both the LAE number density and slice volume are consistent with the expected outcome of the Subaru HSC survey. We add gaussian random noise with variance ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{N}}$ up to 100 times the variance of the Ly$\alpha$ emission, ${\sigma }_{\alpha }$, to simulate foregrounds and compute ${\psi }_{\alpha L}(r)$. We find that the signal-to-noise of the observed ${\psi }_{\alpha L}(r)$ does not change significantly if $\sigma_{\rm N} \le 10 \sigma_\alpha$andshowthatintheseconditionsthemeanlineintensity,$I_{Ly\alpha}$, can be precisely recovered independently of the LAE duty cycle. Even if ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{N}}=100{\sigma }_{\alpha }$, $I_{\alpha }$ can be constrained within a factor $2$. The method works equally well for any other line (e.g. HI 21 cm, [CII], HeII) used for the intensity mapping experiment.