论文标题
21厘米宇宙学的统一校准框架
A Unified Calibration Framework for 21 cm Cosmology
论文作者
论文摘要
校准精度当前是21 cm宇宙学实验中的限制系统。尽管有无数的校准方法,但大多数可以归类为“基于天空的”,这依赖于非常准确的天文前景发射模型,或“冗余”,需要具有近乎相同的天线响应模式的准确定期阵列。这两种类别的校准都不对干涉测量的现实不灵活。实际上,前景模型中的误差,天线位置偏移和光束响应不均匀性降低校准性能并污染宇宙信号。在这里,我们表明,基于天空和冗余的校准可以统一为基于贝叶斯统计形式主义的高度通用且有动机的校准框架。我们的新框架包括天空和冗余校准作为特殊情况,但还可以支持放松这些方法中隐含的僵化假设。此外,我们介绍了新的校准技术,例如没有冗余基线的阵列的冗余校准,代表了用于成像阵列(例如MWA期)的替代校准方法。这些新的校准方法可以减轻系统校准并减少校准误差,从而改善化学测量的精确度。
Calibration precision is currently a limiting systematic in 21 cm cosmology experiments. While there are innumerable calibration approaches, most can be categorized as either `sky-based,' relying on an extremely accurate model of astronomical foreground emission, or `redundant,' requiring a precisely regular array with near-identical antenna response patterns. Both of these classes of calibration are inflexible to the realities of interferometric measurement. In practice, errors in the foreground model, antenna position offsets, and beam response inhomogeneities degrade calibration performance and contaminate the cosmological signal. Here we show that sky-based and redundant calibration can be unified into a highly general and physically motivated calibration framework based on a Bayesian statistical formalism. Our new framework includes sky and redundant calibration as special cases but can additionally support relaxing the rigid assumptions implicit in those approaches. Furthermore, we present novel calibration techniques such as redundant calibration for arrays with no redundant baselines, representing an alternative calibration method for imaging arrays such as the MWA Phase I. These new calibration approaches could mitigate systematics and reduce calibration error, thereby improving the precision of cosmological measurements.