Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-03-10
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ
Scientific paper
Telescopes aiming to measure 21cm emission from the Epoch of Reionization must toe a careful line, balancing the need for raw sensitivity against the stringent calibration requirements for removing bright foregrounds. It is unclear what the optimal design is for achieving both of these goals. Via a pedagogical derivation of an interferometer's response to the power spectrum of 21cm reionization fluctuations, we show that even under optimistic scenarios, first-generation arrays will yield low-SNR detections. We explore the sensitivity gains of array configurations that yield high redundancy in the uv-plane -- configurations that have been largely ignored in the literature. We first introduce a mathematical framework to generate optimal minimum-redundancy configurations. We contrast the sensitivity of such configurations with high-redundancy configurations, finding that high-redundancy configurations can improve power-spectrum sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude. We explore how high-redundancy array configurations can be tuned to various angular scales, enabling array sensitivity to be directed away from regions of the uv-plane (such as the origin) where foregrounds are brighter and where instrumental systematics are more problematic. We demonstrate that a 132-antenna deployment of the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER) observing for 120 days in a high-redundancy configuration will have the requisite sensitivity to detect the power spectrum of the 21cm signal from reionization at a $3\sigma$ level at $k<0.25h\ {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ in a bin of $\Delta{\rm ln} k=1$. We discuss other tradeoffs of low- versus high-redundancy configurations.
Aguirre James
Jacobs Daniel
McQuinn Matthew
Parsons Aaron
Pober Jonathan
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