Cosmic Near-infrared Background Tomography with SPHEREx Using Galaxy Cross-correlations

Abstract

The extragalactic background light (EBL) consists of integrated light from all sources of emission throughout the history of the universe. At near-infrared wavelengths, the EBL is dominated by stellar emission across cosmic time; however, the spectral and redshift information of the emitting sources is entangled and cannot be directly measured by absolute photometry or fluctuation measurements. Cross-correlating near-infrared maps with tracers of known redshift enables EBL redshift tomography, as EBL emission will only correlate with external tracers from the same redshift. Here, we forecast the sensitivity of probing the EBL spectral energy distribution as a function of redshift by cross-correlating the upcoming near-infrared spectro-imaging survey, SPHEREx, with several current and future galaxy redshift surveys. Using a model galaxy luminosity function, we estimate the cross power spectrum clustering amplitude on large scales, and forecast that the near-infrared EBL spectrum can be detected tomographically out to z ∼ 6. We also predict a high-significance measurement (∼10²–10⁴σ) of the small-scale cross power spectrum out to z ∼ 10. The amplitudes of the large-scale cross power spectra can constrain the cosmic evolution of the stellar synthesis process through both continuum and the line emission, while on the nonlinear and Poisson noise scales, the high-sensitivity measurements can probe the mean spectra associated with the tracer population across redshift.

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