The degeneracy between primordial non-Gaussianity and foregrounds in 21 cm intensity mapping experiments

Potential evidence for primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG) is expected to lie in the largest scales mapped by cosmological surveys. Forthcoming 21 cm intensity mapping experiments will aim to probe these scales by surveying neutral hydrogen (H I) within galaxies. However, foreground signals dominate the 21 cm emission, meaning foreground cleaning is required to recover the cosmological signal. The effect this has is to damp the H I power spectrum on the largest scales, especially along the line of sight. Whilst there is agreement that this contamination is potentially problematic for probing PNG, it is yet to be fully explored and quantified. In this work, we carry out the first forecasts on fNL that incorporate simulated foreground maps that are removed using techniques employed in real data. Using an Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis on an SKA1-MID-like survey, we demonstrate that foreground cleaned data recovers biased values [fNL = −102.1+−873996 (68 per cent CL)] on our fNL = 0 fiducial input. Introducing a model with fixed parameters for the foreground contamination allows us to recover unbiased results (fNL = −2.94+−111149). However, it is not clear that we will have sufficient understanding of foreground contamination to allow for such rigid models. Treating the main parameter k||FG in our foreground model as a nuisance parameter and marginalizing over it, still recovers unbiased results but at the expense of larger errors (fNL = 0.75+−404425), which can only be reduced by imposing the Planck 2018 prior. Our results show that significant progress on understanding and controlling foreground removal effects is necessary for studying PNG with H I intensity mapping.