COMAP Pathfinder -- Season 2 results IV. A stack on eBOSS/DESI quasars

Abstract

We present a stack of data from the second season of the CO Mapping Array Project (COMAP) Pathfinder on the positions of quasars from eBOSS and DESI. COMAP is a Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) experiment targeting dense molecular gas via CO(1--0) emission at $z\sim3$. COMAP's Season 2 represents a $3\times$ increase in map-level sensitivity over the previous Early Science data release. We do not detect any CO emission in the stack, instead finding an upper limit of $10.0\times 10^{10}\ \mathrm{K\ km\ s^{-1}\ pc^2}$ at 95\% confidence within an $\sim 18\ \mathrm{cMpc}$ box. We compare this upper limit to models of the CO emission stacked on quasars and find a tentative ($\sim 3 \sigma$) tension between the limit and the brightest stack models after accounting for a suite of additional sources of experimental attenuation and uncertainty, including quasar velocity uncertainty, pipeline signal loss, cosmic variance, and interloper emission in the LIM data. The COMAP-eBOSS/DESI stack is primarily a measurement of the CO luminosity in the quasars' wider environment and is therefore potentially subject to environmental effects such as feedback. With our current simple models of the galaxy-halo connection, we are thus unable to confidently rule out any models of cosmic CO with the stack alone. Conversely, the stack's sensitivity to these large-scale environmental effects has the potential to make it a powerful tool for galaxy formation science, once we are able to constrain the average CO luminosity via the auto power spectrum (a key goal of COMAP).