The effect of foreground subtraction on cosmological measurements from intensity mapping

We model a 21-cm intensity mapping survey in the redshift range 0.01 < z < 1.5 designed to simulate the skies as seen by future radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array, including instrumental noise and Galactic foregrounds. In our pipeline, we remove the Galactic foregrounds with a fast independent component analysis technique. We present the power spectrum of the large-scale matter distribution, C(a), before and after the application of this foreground removal method and calculate the systematic errors. Our simulations show a certain level of bias remains in the power spectrum at all scales a < 400. At large-scales a < 30 this bias is particularly significant. We measure the impact of these systematics in two ways: first we fit cosmological parameters to the broad-band shape of the C(a) where we find that the best fit is significantly shifted at the 2-3 sigma level depending on masking and noise levels. However, secondly, we recover cosmic distances without biases at all simulated redshifts by fitting the baryon acoustic oscillations in the C(a). We conclude that further advances in foreground removal are needed in order to recover unbiased information from the broad-band shape of the C(a), however, intensity mapping experiments will be a powerful tool for mapping cosmic distances across a wide redshift range.