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Register a new userThe Impact of Tandem Redundant/Sky-Based Calibration in MWA Phase II Data Analysis
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Precise instrumental calibration is of crucial importance to 21-cm cosmology experiments. The Murchison Widefield Arrays (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 cite{Li_2018} and cite{Wenyang_2019} studied the effect of tandem calibration on the EoR0 field and found that it yielded no significant improvement in the power spectrum 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 power spectrum from tandem calibration are significant. To understand this result, we analyze both the calibration solutions themselves and the effects on the power spectrum 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-incompleteness error.
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Interferometric arrays seeking to measure the 21 cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization must contend with overwhelmingly bright emission from foreground sources. Accurate recovery of the 21 cm signal will require precise calibration of the array, and several new avenues for calibration have been pursued in recent years, including methods using redundancy in the antenna configuration. The newly upgraded Phase II of Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is the first interferometer that has large numbers of redundant baselines while retaining good instantaneous UV-coverage. This array therefore provides a unique opportunity to compare redundant calibration with sky-model based algorithms. In this paper, we present the first results from comparing both calibration approaches with MWA Phase II observations. For redundant calibration, we use the package OMNICAL, and produce sky-based calibration solutions with the analysis package Fast Holographic Deconvolution (FHD). There are three principal results. (1) We report the success of OMNICAL on observations of ORBComm satellites, showing substantial agreement between redundant visibility measurements after calibration. (2) We directly compare OMNICAL calibration solutions with those from FHD, and demonstrate these two different calibration schemes give extremely similar results. (3) We explore improved calibration by combining OMNICAL and FHD. We evaluate these combined methods using power spectrum techniques developed for EoR analysis and find evidence for marginal improvements mitigating artifacts in the power spectrum. These results are likely limited by signal-to-noise in the six hours of data used, but suggest future directions for combining these two calibration schemes.
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.
The MWA is a next-generation radio interferometer under construction in remote Western Australia. The data rate from the correlator makes storing the raw data infeasible, so the data must be processed in real-time. The processing task is of order ~10 TFLOPS. The remote location of the MWA limits the power that can be allocated to computing. We describe the design and implementation of elements of the MWA real-time data processing system which leverage the computing abilities of modern graphics processing units (GPUs). The matrix algebra and texture mapping capabilities of GPUs are well suited to the majority of tasks involved in real-time calibration and imaging. Considerable performance advantages over a conventional CPU-based reference implementation are obtained.
The Murchison Widefield Array is a low-frequency Square Kilometre Array precursor located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. Primarily designed as an imaging telescope, but with a flexible signal path, the capabilities of this telescope have recently been extended to include off-line incoherent and tied-array beam formation using recorded antenna voltages. This has provided the capability for high-time and frequency resolution observations, including a pulsar science program. This paper describes the algorithms and pipeline that we have developed to form the tied array beam products from the summation of calibrated signals of the antenna elements, and presents example polarimetric profiles for PSRs J0437-4715 and J1900-2600 at 185 MHz.
A new method for analyzing the returns of the custom-made micro-LIDAR system, which is operated along with the two MAGIC telescopes, allows to apply atmospheric corrections in the MAGIC data analysis chain. Such corrections make it possible to extend the effective observation time of MAGIC under adverse atmospheric conditions and reduce the systematic errors of energy and flux in the data analysis. LIDAR provides a range-resolved atmospheric backscatter profile from which the extinction of Cherenkov light from air shower events can be estimated. Knowledge of the extinction can allow to reconstruct the true image parameters, including energy and flux. Our final goal is to recover the source-intrinsic energy spectrum also for data affected by atmospheric extinction from aerosol layers, such as clouds.
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