H i intensity mapping with the MIGHTEE survey: power spectrum estimates

Intensity mapping (IM) with neutral hydrogen is a promising avenue to probe the large-scale structure of the Universe. In this paper, we demonstrate that using the 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope as a connected interferometer, it is possible to make a statistical detection of H i in the post-reionization Universe. With the MIGHTEE (MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration) survey project observing in the L-band (856 MHz < ν < 1712 MHz, z < 0.66), we can achieve the required sensitivity to measure the H i IM power spectrum on quasi-linear scales, which will provide an important complementarity to the single-dish IM MeerKAT observations. We present a purpose-built simulation pipeline that emulates the MIGHTEE observations and forecasts the constraints that can be achieved on the H i power spectrum at z = 0.27 for k > 0.3 $\rm {Mpc}^{-1}$ using the foreground avoidance method. We present the power spectrum estimates with the current simulation on the COSMOS field that includes contributions from H i, noise, and point-source models constructed from the observed MIGHTEE data. The results from our visibility-based pipeline are in qualitative agreement to the already available MIGHTEE data. This paper demonstrates that MeerKAT can achieve very high sensitivity to detect H i with the full MIGHTEE survey on quasi-linear scales (signal-to-noise ratio >7 at k = 0.49 $\rm {Mpc}^{-1}$ ) that are instrumental in probing cosmological quantities such as the spectral index of fluctuation, constraints on warm dark matter, the quasi-linear redshift space distortions, and the measurement of the H i content of the Universe up to z ∼ 0.5.