Radio frequency interference identification using eigenvalue decomposition for multi-beam observations
Abstract
With the installation of next-generation phased array feed (PAF) receivers on radio telescopes, there is an urgent need to develop effective and computationally efficient radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation methods for large-scale surveys. Here we present a new RFI mitigation package, called mRAID (multi-beam RAdio frequency Interference Detector), which uses the eigenvalue decomposition algorithm to identify RFI in cross-correlation matrix (CCM) of data recorded by multiple beams. When applied to high time-resolution pulsar search data from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), mRAID demonstrates excellent performance in identifying RFI over short timescales, thereby enhancing the efficiency of pulsar and fast radio burst (FRB) searches. Since the computation of the CCM and the eigenvalue decomposition for each time sub-integration and frequency channel are independent, the process is fully parallelisable. As a result, mRAID offers a significant computational advantage over commonly used RFI detection methods.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.16278,
title = {Radio frequency interference identification using eigenvalue decomposition for multi-beam observations},
author = {Juntao Bai and Shi Dai and Na Wang and Stefan Osłowski and Shuangqiang Wang and George Hobbs and Jianping Yuan and Wenming Yan and Qijun Zhi and Lunhua Shang and Xin Xu and Shijun Dang and De Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16278},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
9 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in PASA