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arxiv: 1712.07212 · v2 · pith:6WOAMXP5new · submitted 2017-12-19 · 🌌 astro-ph.IM · astro-ph.CO

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

classification 🌌 astro-ph.IM astro-ph.CO
keywords calibrationstructurespectraladdingcosmologyforegroundshowevermeasurement
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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.

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    Simulations show hybrid foreground mitigation (GPR + PCA combined with avoidance) recovers the HI 21cm signal within 2σ for gain calibration errors ≤1% in SKA1-Low AA* observations over 0.05-0.5 Mpc^{-1} scales.