Tracing the intra-halo light with Hyper Suprime-Cam images

The intra-halo light (IHL) is the diffuse stellar component that surrounds galaxies, groups, and clusters. The IHL formation is intimately linked to the hierarchical assembly of the system and therefore provides us with deep insights into its evolution. However, the low surface brightness of the IHL makes it challenging to detect and also to distinguish from the point spread function (PSF) effect of the telescope. In this work, I present our innovative technique which corrects for the PSF-scattered light and creates a two-dimensional profile model of the IHL in astronomical images. By assuming a power-law profile for the IHL extended component, I show the preliminary results of applying this technique to mock observations of the third data release of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP PDR3) and our extended HSC-SSP PDR3 PSF models (R∼5.6 arcmin, available at: GitHub/luciagarate/HSC_PSFs). We believe this technique provides the community with a crucial tool to accurately characterise the IHL and improve upon previous analyses by better accounting for systematics. As the image quality, depth, and processing of HSC and LSST first-year data are expected to be similar, the method we have developed here will be directly applicable and beneficial to the LSST.