CMB-HD Foregrounds: Simulations, Source Detection, and Foreground Removal

We present simulations of the microwave sky at 2.5 arcsecond resolution over 100 square degrees, generated from existing full-sky, lower-resolution simulations, and use them to demonstrate extragalactic foreground removal for a CMB-HD survey. Our cleaning method detects and removes the cosmic infrared background and radio galaxies, yielding source catalogs that are 95% complete down to flux limits of 0.008 and 0.04 mJy at 90 and 148 GHz, respectively. It also identifies and removes galaxy clusters via the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, producing a cluster sample that is nearly complete above M 500c = 5 times 10 13 M. After cleaning, the residual foreground-plus-noise power spectrum of the coadded 90 and 148 GHz temperature map is 50% higher than previous idealized estimates, increasing cosmological parameter uncertainties for an 11-parameter Λ CDM + N eff + sum m ν + T AGN + A kSZ + n kSZ model by less than 7%. The small impact on cosmological parameters reflects the strong constraining power of CMB polarization, the temperature-polarization cross spectra, and CMB lensing spectra reconstructed from polarization-only estimators, all of which are minimally affected by extragalactic foregrounds. In particular, the survey remains a sensitive probe of light thermal relic particles, achieving σ(N eff) = 0.0154, which can exclude any new species (ΔN eff 0.027) with at least 90% confidence. Our simulation and foreground-removal codes are publicly available and should aid the development of analysis pipelines for ultradeep, ultrahigh-resolution microwave surveys.