English

Polarized Redundant-Baseline Calibration for 21 cm Cosmology Without Adding Spectral Structure

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2018-05-02 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

21 cm cosmology is a promising new probe of the evolution of visible matter in our universe, especially during the poorly-constrained Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization. However, in order to separate the 21 cm signal from bright astrophysical foregrounds, we need an exquisite understanding of our telescopes so as to avoid adding spectral structure to spectrally-smooth foregrounds. One powerful calibration method relies on repeated simultaneous measurements of the same interferometric baseline to solve for the sky signal and for instrumental parameters simultaneously. However, certain degrees of freedom are not constrained by asserting internal consistency between redundant measurements. In this paper, we review the origin of these "degeneracies" of redundant-baseline calibration and demonstrate how they can source unwanted spectral structure in our measurement and show how to eliminate that additional, artificial structure. We also generalize redundant calibration to dual-polarization instruments, derive the degeneracy structure, and explore the unique challenges to calibration and preserving spectral smoothness presented by a polarized measurement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.07212,
  title  = {Polarized Redundant-Baseline Calibration for 21 cm Cosmology Without Adding Spectral Structure},
  author = {Joshua S. Dillon and Saul A. Kohn and Aaron R. Parsons and James E. Aguirre and Zaki S. Ali and Gianni Bernardi and Nicholas S. Kern and Wenyang Li and Adrian Liu and Chuneeta D. Nunhokee and Jonathan C. Pober},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.07212},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

12 pages, 3 figures, updated to match the published MNRAS version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:23:47.863Z