First Season MWA EoR Power Spectrum Results at Redshift 7
Abstract
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) has collected hundreds of hours of Epoch of Reionization (EoR) data and now faces the challenge of overcoming foreground and systematic contamination to reduce the data to a cosmological measurement. We introduce several novel analysis techniques such as cable reflection calibration, hyper-resolution gridding kernels, diffuse foreground model subtraction, and quality control methods. Each change to the analysis pipeline is tested against a two dimensional power spectrum figure of merit to demonstrate improvement. We incorporate the new techniques into a deep integration of 32 hours of MWA data. This data set is used to place a systematic-limited upper limit on the cosmological power spectrum of mK at h~Mpc and , consistent with other published limits, and a modest improvement (factor of 1.4) over previous MWA results. From this deep analysis we have identified a list of improvements to be made to our EoR data analysis strategies. These improvements will be implemented in the future and detailed in upcoming publications.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1608.06281,
title = {First Season MWA EoR Power Spectrum Results at Redshift 7},
author = {A. P. Beardsley and B. J. Hazelton and I. S. Sullivan and P. Carroll and N. Barry and M. Rahimi and B. Pindor and C. M. Trott and J. Line and Daniel C. Jacobs and M. F. Morales and J. C. Pober and G. Bernardi and Judd D. Bowman and M. P. Busch and F. Briggs and R. J. Cappallo and B. E. Corey and A. de Oliveira-Costa and Joshua S. Dillon and D. Emrich and A. Ewall-Wice and L. Feng and B. M. Gaensler and R. Goeke and L. J. Greenhill and J. N. Hewitt and N. Hurley-Walker and M. Johnston-Hollitt and D. L. Kaplan and J. C. Kasper and H. S. Kim and E. Kratzenberg and E. Lenc and A. Loeb and C. J. Lonsdale and M. J. Lynch and B. McKinley and S. R. McWhirter and D. A. Mitchell and E. Morgan and A. R. Neben and Nithyanandan Thyagarajan and D. Oberoi and A. R. Offringa and S. M. Ord and S. Paul and T. Prabu and P. Procopio and J. Riding and A. E. E. Rogers and A. Roshi and N. Udaya Shankar and Shiv K. Sethi and K. S. Srivani and R. Subrahmanyan and M. Tegmark and S. J. Tingay and M. Waterson and R. B. Wayth and R. L. Webster and A. R. Whitney and A. Williams and C. L. Williams and C. Wu and J. S. B. Wyithe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.06281},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
21 pages, 16 figures, accepted to ApJ