Spectral Redundancy for Calibrating Interferometers and Suppressing the Foreground Wedge in 21\,cm Cosmology
arXiv (Cornell University)(2023)
摘要
Observations of 21\,cm line from neutral hydrogen promise to be an exciting
new probe of astrophysics and cosmology during the Cosmic Dawn and through the
Epoch of Reionization (EoR) to when dark energy accelerates the expansion of
the Universe. At each of these epochs, separating bright foregrounds from the
cosmological signal is a primary challenge that requires exquisite calibration.
In this paper, we present a new calibration method called \textsc{nucal} that
extends redundant-baseline calibration, allowing spectral variation in antenna
responses to be solved for by using correlations between visibilities measuring
the same angular Fourier modes at different frequencies. By modeling the
chromaticity of the beam-weighted sky with a tunable set of discrete prolate
spheroidal sequences (DPSS), we develop a calibration loop that optimizes for
spectrally smooth calibrated visibilities. Crucially, this technique does not
require explicit models of the sky or the primary beam. With simulations that
incorporate realistic source and beam chromaticity, we show that this method
solves for unsmooth bandpass features, exposes narrowband interference
systematics, and suppresses smooth-spectrum foregrounds below the level of
21\,cm reionization models, even within much of the so-called "wedge" region
where current foreground mitigation techniques struggle. We show that this
foreground subtraction can be performed with minimal cosmological signal loss
for certain well-sampled angular Fourier modes, making spectral-redundant
calibration a promising technique for current and next-generation 21\,cm
intensity mapping experiments.
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关键词
calibrating interferometers,foreground wedge
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