Determining the HI content of galaxies via intensity mapping
  cross-correlations
  We propose an innovative method for measuring the neutral hydrogen (HI)
content of an optically-selected spectroscopic sample of galaxies through
cross-correlation with HI intensity mapping measurements. We show that the
HI-galaxy cross-power spectrum contains an additive shot noise term which
scales with the average HI brightness temperature of the optically-selected
galaxies, allowing constraints to be placed on the average HI mass per galaxy.
This approach can estimate the HI content of populations too faint to directly
observe through their 21cm emission over a wide range of redshifts. This
cross-correlation, as a function of optical luminosity or colour, can be used
to derive HI-scaling relations. We demonstrate that this signal will be
detectable by cross-correlating upcoming Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP)
observations with existing optically-selected samples. We also use
semi-analytic simulations to verify that the HI mass can be successfully
recovered by our technique in the range M_HI > 10^8 M_solar, in a manner
independent of the underlying power spectrum shape. We conclude that this
method is a powerful tool to study galaxy evolution, which only requires a
single intensity mapping dataset to infer complementary HI gas information from
existing optical and infra-red observations.
