The Electromagnetic Characteristics of the Tianlai Cylindrical Pathfinder Array

A great challenge for 21 cm intensity mapping experiments is the strong foreground radiation which is orders of magnitude brighter than the 21 cm signal.Removal of the foreground takes advantage of the fact that its frequency spectrum is smooth while the redshifted 21 cm signal spectrum is stochastic.However,a complication is the nonsmoothness of the instrument response.This paper describes the electromagnetic simulation of the Tianlai cylinder array,a pathfinder for 21 cm intensity mapping experiments.Due to the vast scales involved,a direct simulation requires a large amount of computing resources.We have made the simulation practical by using a combination of methods:first simulate a single feed,then an array of feed units,finally with the feed array and a cylindrical reflector together,obtain the response for a single cylinder.We studied its radiation pattern,bandpass response and the effects of mutual coupling between feed units,and compared the results with observation.Many features seen in the measurement result are reproduced well in the simulation,especially the oscillatory features which are associated with the standing waves on the reflector.The mutual coupling between feed units is quantified with Sparameters,which decrease as the distance between the two feeds increases.Based on the simulated S-parameters,we estimate the correlated noise which has been seen in the visibility data,and the results show very good agreement with the data in both magnitude and frequency structures.These results provide useful insights on the problem of 21 cm signal extraction for real instruments.

The Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder array: System functions and basic performance analysis

The Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder is a radio interferometer array designed to test techniques for 21 cm intensity mapping in the post-reionization Universe,with the ultimate aim of mapping the large scale structure and measuring cosmological parameters such as the dark energy equation of state.Each of its three parallel cylinder reflectors is oriented in the north-south direction,and the array has a large field of view.As the Earth rotates,the northern sky is observed by drift scanning.The array is located in Hongliuxia,a radio-quiet site in Xinjiang,and saw its first light in September 2016.In this first data analysis paper for the Tianlai cylinder array,we discuss the sub-system qualification tests,and present basic system performance obtained from preliminary analysis of the commissioning observations during 2016-2018.We show typical interferometric visibility data,from which we derive the actual beam profile in the east-west direction and the frequency band-pass response.We describe also the calibration process to determine the complex gains for the array elements,either using bright astronomical point sources,or an artificial on site calibrator source,and discuss the instrument response stability,crucial for transit interferometry.Based on this analysis,we find a system temperature of about 90 K,and we also estimate the sensitivity of the array.