English

Pixel-Based Non-Linearity Correction for the WFC3 IR Detector

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2025-12-02 v1

Abstract

The current non-linearity correction for the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared (WFC3/IR) channel is based on ground-based data acquired during WFC3's Thermal Vacuum 3 (TV3) testing campaign. In the current reference file, the correction coefficients derived for each pixel are averaged over each of the four detector quadrants. In this work, we compute a new pixel-based non-linearity correction using in-flight calibration observations with the internal tungsten lamp flats acquired between 2011 and 2013. We derive the new correction coefficients by fitting a third-order polynomial to the accumulated signal ``up-the-ramp" for each pixel. Approximately 2\% of IR detector pixels are flagged as bad, and a solution cannot be computed. For these, we use the quadrant averages of the new correction coefficients. An accompanying report (\cite{huynh2025}) provides detailed testing results using both internal flats and external science targets acquired in a variety of observing modes. The report highlights improvements in photometry derived from ``\_flt.fits" data products calibrated using the new reference file, with the largest improvement for pixels with fluence levels approaching the full well limit of \sim80,000 ee^- . A new NLINFILE reference file was delivered in October 2025 and will be used to reprocess all WFC3/IR imaging and grism observations in the MAST archive.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.01951,
  title  = {Pixel-Based Non-Linearity Correction for the WFC3 IR Detector},
  author = {Sachindev S. Shenoy and Ky Huynh and Varun Bajaj and Jennifer Mack},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01951},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures, 3 equations

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:04:13.835Z