Redundant-Baseline Calibration of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array
Name
2003.08399.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3.26 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
eff45bfc60c26f3168c0394c0b676a53
Author(s)
Hewitt, Jacqueline N
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
Hewitt, Jacqueline N. 2020. "Redundant-Baseline Calibration of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 499 (4).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 21-cm cosmology, precision calibration is key to the separation of the neutral hydrogen signal from very bright but spectrally smooth astrophysical foregrounds. The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), an interferometer specialized for 21-cm cosmology and now under construction in South Africa, was designed to be largely calibrated using the self-consistency of repeated measurements of the same interferometric modes. This technique, known as redundant-baseline calibration resolves most of the internal degrees of freedom in the calibration problem. It assumes, however, on antenna elements with identical primary beams placed precisely on a redundant grid. In this work, we review the detailed implementation of the algorithms enabling redundant-baseline calibration and report results with HERA data.We quantify the effects of real-world non-redundancy and how they compare to the idealized scenario in which redundant measurements differ only in their noise realizations. Finally, we study how non-redundancy can produce spurious temporal structure in our calibration solutions-both in data and in simulations-and present strategies for mitigating that structure.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1093/MNRAS/STAA3001
