English

Reduced Ambiguity Calibration for LOFAR

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2013-07-19 v1 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

Interferometric calibration always yields non unique solutions. It is therefore essential to remove these ambiguities before the solutions could be used in any further modeling of the sky, the instrument or propagation effects such as the ionosphere. We present a method for LOFAR calibration which does not yield a unitary ambiguity, especially under ionospheric distortions. We also present exact ambiguities we get in our solutions, in closed form. Casting this as an optimization problem, we also present conditions for this approach to work. The proposed method enables us to use the solutions obtained via calibration for further modeling of instrumental and propagation effects. We provide extensive simulation results on the performance of our method. Moreover, we also give cases where due to degeneracy, this method fails to perform as expected and in such cases, we suggest exploiting diversity in time, space and frequency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.6654,
  title  = {Reduced Ambiguity Calibration for LOFAR},
  author = {Sarod Yatawatta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.6654},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

Draft version. Final version published on 10 April 2012

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:11:33.255Z