Spectral Data-cube Cleaning for CCAT Deep Spectroscopic Survey. I. Effect of correlated noise and filtering on the power spectrum

Abstract

The Epoch of Reionization Spectrometer (EoR-Spec) on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) will conduct the CCAT Deep Spectroscopic Survey (DSS) to perform line-intensity mapping of redshifted [C II] emission. Atmospheric $1/f$ noise and instrumental systematics affect power-spectrum recovery. We present realistic end-to-end simulations to quantify these effects and evaluate a Filter-and-Bin (F&B) pipeline. The simulated observations include instrument response, astrophysical emission, atmospheric noise, and observing strategy. The pipeline suppresses atmospheric $1/f$ noise by about four orders of magnitude at low temporal frequencies while leaving only minor residual correlated noise. For a single EoR-Spec module operating at 50% observing efficiency, the DSS is expected to detect the combined [C II] + CO power spectrum on shot-noise-dominated scales ($k>0.1{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$). With two modules operating at full efficiency, detections are achievable over all targeted spatial scales. The transfer function exceeds 80% at $k\gtrsim 0.5{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$ but falls below 20% at $k\lesssim 0.1{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$, indicating significant suppression of large-scale modes. These results demonstrate that the F&B pipeline is effective for recovering the shot-noise regime, while improved map-making techniques will be required for accurate large-scale clustering measurements.

19 pages, 15 figures, submitted to A&A