Collaborative Research: It's TIME! Mapping cosmic star formation history with CO and CII

This award supports observations and analysis with the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME), an imaging spectrometer that will observe on the Arizona Radio Observatory 12-meter radio telescope at Kitt Peak. TIME will probe the evolution of our universe over cosmic time and deepen our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology by answering fundamental questions like how is gas evolving into ionizing sources, and how does that ionization trace with large-scale structure? TIME will map large portions of the sky in order to probe the early epochs of the universe by measuring the bright ionized carbon emission line from galaxies during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) and by measuring carbon monoxide during the peak of star formation. The TIME team will continue to expand their existing efforts to open pathways for student experiential learning and train students from high school to graduate school in experimental techniques in astrophysics. These opportunities for students will bolster the preparation of the workforce for an increasingly complex and competitive world and address the need to increase participation from underrepresented groups in STEM. The data and publication of scientific results will contribute to our understanding of how structure evolved in our universe. TIME is a high-throughput millimeter-wave imaging spectrometer array designed to perform line intensity mapping. TIME will constrain the total [CII] emissivity during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) by measuring [CII] clustering signals, and determine the cosmic abundance of molecular gas by measuring carbon monoxide (CO) intensity fluctuations at 0.5 < z < 2. TIME combines large light-gathering throughput with 32 novel waveguide spectrometers using 1,920 bolometers to observe between 183 to 326 GHz with spectral resolving power of 100. TIME has been deployed to the Arizona Radio Observatory 12m ALMA prototype antenna (ARO 12m) for an engineering run in 2019 and a commissioning run in 2022, during which the team demonstrated detector responsivity, optical performance, and noise suppression techniques. This award supports carrying out scientific operations through 10 months of winter-month telescope time spread over three years, developing and deploying a data reduction pipeline, and publishing scientific and technical findings from the program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.