Expanded Generalized Needlet Internal Linear Combination (eGNILC) Framework for the 21-cm Foreground Removal

Abstract: The Generalized Needlet Internal Linear Combination (GNILC) method is a non-parametric component separation algorithm to remove the foreground contamination of the 21-cm intensity mapping data. In this work, we perform the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) along the frequency axis in the expanded GNILC framework (denoted eGNILC) which helps reduce the power loss in low multipoles, and further demonstrate its performance. We also calculate the eGNILC bias to modify the criterion for determining the degrees of freedom of the foreground (dof), and embed the Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) in mixing matrix computation to obtain a blind component separation method. We find that the eGNILC bias is related to the averaged domain size and the dof of the foreground but not the underlying 21-cm signal. In case of no beam effect, the eGNILC bias is negligible for simple power law foregrounds outside the Galactic plane. We also examine the eGNILC performance in the SKA-MID (SKA Phase-I in mid-frequency) and BINGO (Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations) simulations. We show that if the adjacent frequency channels are not highly correlated, eGNILC can recover the underlying 21-cm signal with good accuracy. With the varying Airy-disk beam applied to both SKA-MID and BINGO, the power spectra of 21-cm can be effectively recovered at the multipoles $\ell \in [20, 250]$ and $[20, 300]$ respectively. With no instrumental noise, the SKA-MID exhibits $\lesssim 20\%$ power loss and BINGO exhibits $\sim 10\%$ power loss. The varying Airy-disk beam only causes significant errors at large multipoles.