The impact of tandem redundant/sky-based calibration in MWA Phase II data analysis
Abstract Precise instrumental calibration is of crucial importance to 21-cm cosmology experiments. The Murchison Widefield Array’s (MWA) Phase II compact configuration offers us opportunities for both redundant calibration and sky-based calibration algorithms; using the two in tandem is a potential approach to mitigate calibration errors caused by inaccurate sky models. The MWA Epoch of Reionization (EoR) experiment targets three patches of the sky (dubbed EoR0, EoR1, and EoR2) with deep observations. Previous work in Li et al. (2018) and (2019) studied the effect of tandem calibration on the EoR0 field and found that it yielded no significant improvement in the power spectrum (PS) over sky-based calibration alone. In this work, we apply similar techniques to the EoR1 field and find a distinct result: the improvements in the PS from tandem calibration are significant. To understand this result, we analyse both the calibration solutions themselves and the effects on the PS over three nights of EoR1 observations. We conclude that the presence of the bright radio galaxy Fornax A in EoR1 degrades the performance of sky-based calibration, which in turn enables redundant calibration to have a larger impact. These results suggest that redundant calibration can indeed mitigate some level of model more »
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Award ID(s):
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10224854
Journal Name:
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia
Volume:
37
ISSN:
1323-3580
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a drift scan radio telescope operating across the 400–800 MHz band. CHIME is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, BC, Canada. The instrument is designed to map neutral hydrogen over the redshift range 0.8–2.5 to constrain the expansion history of the universe. This goal drives the design features of the instrument. CHIME consists of four parallel cylindrical reflectors, oriented north–south, each 100 m × 20 m and outfitted with a 256-element dual-polarization linear feed array. CHIME observes a two-degree-wide stripe covering the entire meridian at any given moment, observing three-quarters of the sky every day owing to Earth’s rotation. An FX correlator utilizes field-programmable gate arrays and graphics processing units to digitize and correlate the signals, with different correlation products generated for cosmological, fast radio burst, pulsar, very long baseline interferometry, and 21 cm absorber back ends. For the cosmology back end, the$Nfeed2$correlation matrix is formed for 1024 frequency channels across the band every 31 ms. A data receiver system applies calibration and flagging and, for our primary cosmological data product, stacks redundant baselines and integrates for 10 s. We present an overview of themore »