The Baryon Mapping Experiment (BMX), a 21cm intensity mapping pathfinder
Abstract
The Baryon Mapping eXperiment (BMX) is an interferometric array designed as a pathfinder for a future post-reionization 21 cm intensity mapping survey. It consists of four 4-meter parabolic reflectors each having offset pyramidal horn feed, quad-ridge orthomode transducer, temperature-stabilized RF amplification and filtering, and pulsed noise injection diode. An undersampling readout scheme uses 8-bit digitizers running at 1.1 Gsamples/sec to provide access to signals from 1.1 - 1.55 GHz (third Nyquist zone), corresponding to HI emission from sources at redshift . An FX correlator is implemented in GPU and generates 28 GB/day of time-ordered visibility data. About 7,000 hours of data were collected from Jan. 2019 - May 2020, and we will present results on system performance including sensitivity, beam mapping studies, observations of bright celestial targets, and system electronics upgrades. BMX is a pathfinder for the proposed PUMA intensity mapping survey in the 2030s.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2011.08695,
title = {The Baryon Mapping Experiment (BMX), a 21cm intensity mapping pathfinder},
author = {Paul O'Connor and Anže Slosar and Maile Harris and Justine Haupt and John Kuczewski and Emily Kuhn and Laura Newburgh and Annie Polish and Benjamin Saliwanchik and Christopher Sheehy and Paul Stankus and Gregory Troiani and Will Tyndall},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.08695},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
15 pages, 14 figures. Overview of the BMX testbed. Accepted submission to the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference