Application of Regularization Methods in the Sky Map Reconstruction of the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder Array

The Tianlai cylinder pathfinder is a radio interferometer array to test 21 cm intensity mapping techniques in the post-reionization era.It works in passive drift scan mode to survey the sky visible in the northern hemisphere.To deal with the large instantaneous field of view and the spherical sky,we decompose the drift scan data into m-modes,which are linearly related to the sky intensity.The sky map is reconstructed by solving the linear interferometer equations.Due to incomplete uv coverage of the interferometer baselines,this inverse problem is usually ill-posed,and regularization method is needed for its solution.In this paper,we use simulation to investigate two frequently used regularization methods,the Truncated Singular Value Decomposition(TSVD),and the Tikhonov regularization techniques.Choosing the regularization parameter is very important for its application.We employ the generalized cross validation method and the L-curve method to determine the optimal value.We compare the resulting maps obtained with the different regularization methods,and for the different parameters derived using the different criteria.While both methods can yield good maps for a range of regularization parameters,in the Tikhonov method the suppression of noisy modes are more gradually applied,produce more smooth maps which avoids some visual artefacts in the maps generated with the TSVD method.

A Hierarchical Method for Locating the Interferometric Fringes of Celestial Sources in the Visibility Data

In source detection in the Tianlai project,locating the interferometric fringe in visibility data accurately will influence downstream tasks drastically,such as physical parameter estimation and weak source exploration.Considering that traditional locating methods are time-consuming and supervised methods require a great quantity of expensive labeled data,in this paper,we first investigate characteristics of interferometric fringes in the simulation and real scenario separately,and integrate an almost parameter-free unsupervised clustering method and seeding filling or eraser algorithm to propose a hierarchical plug and play method to improve location accuracy.Then,we apply our method to locate single and multiple sources’interferometric fringes in simulation data.Next,we apply our method to real data taken from the Tianlai radio telescope array.Finally,we compare with unsupervised methods that are state of the art.These results show that our method has robustness in different scenarios and can improve location measurement accuracy effectively.

The electrical design of a membrane antenna for a lunar-based low-frequency radio telescope

Detecting primordial fluctuations from the cosmic dark ages requires extremely large low-frequency radio telescope arrays deployed on the far side of the Moon.The antenna of such an array must be lightweight,easily storable and transportable,deployable on a large scale,durable,and capable of good electrical performance.A membrane antenna is an excellent candidate to meet these criteria.We study the design of a low-frequency membrane antenna for a lunar-based low-frequency(<30 MHz)radio telescope constructed from polyimide film widely used in aerospace applications,owing to its excellent dielectric properties and high stability as a substrate material.We first design and optimize an antenna in free space through dipole deformation and coupling principles,then simulate an antenna on the lunar surface with a simple lunar soil model,yielding an efficiency greater than 90%in the range of 12-19 MHz and greater than 10%in the range of 5-35 MHz.The antenna inherits the omni-directional radiation pattern of a simple dipole antenna in the 5-30 MHz frequency band,giving a large field of view and allowing detection of the 21 cm global signal when used alone.A demonstration prototype is constructed,and its measured electrical property is found to be consistent with simulated results using|S11|measurements.This membrane antenna can potentially fulfill the requirements of a lunar low-frequency array,establishing a solid technical foundation for future large-scale arrays for exploring the cosmic dark ages.

A Simulation of Calibration and Map-making Errors of the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder Array

The Tianlai cylinder array is a pathfinder for developing and testing 21 cm intensity mapping techniques.In this paper,we use numerical simulation to assess how its measurement is affected by thermal noise and the errors in calibration and map-making process,and the error in the sky map reconstructed from a drift scan survey.Here we consider only the single frequency,unpolarized case.The beam is modeled by fitting to the electromagnetic simulation of the antenna,and the variations of the complex gains of the array elements are modeled by Gaussian processes.Mock visibility data are generated and run through our data processing pipeline.We find that the accuracy of the current calibration is limited primarily by the absolute calibration,where the error comes mainly from the approximation of a single dominating point source.We then studied the m-mode map-making with the help of Moore-Penrose inverse.We find that discarding modes with singular values smaller than a threshold could generate visible artifacts in the map.The impacts of the residue variation of the complex gain and thermal noise are also investigated.The thermal noise in the map varies with latitude,being minimum at the latitude passing through the zenith of the telescope.The angular power spectrum of the reconstructed map show that the current Tianlai cylinder pathfinder,which has a shorter maximum baseline length in the North-South direction,can measure modes up to l■2πb_(NS)/λ~200 very well,but would lose a significant fraction of higher angular modes when noise is present.These results help us to identify the main limiting factors in our current array configuration and data analysis procedure,and suggest that the performance can be improved by reconfiguration of the array feed positions.

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.

A Fast Radio Burst Backend for the Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array

The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array is a radio interferometer array consisting of 16 six-meter dish antennas.The original digital backend integration time is at the seconds level,designed for H I intensity mapping experiment.A new digital backend with millisecond response is added to enable it to search for fast radio burst during its observations.The design and calibration of this backend,and the real time search pipeline for it are described in this paper.It is capable of forming 16 digital beams for each linear polarization,covering an area of 19.6 square degrees.The search pipeline is capable of searching for,recording and classifying FRBs automatically in real time.In commissioning,we succeeded in capturing the signal pulses from the pulsars PSR B0329+54 and B2021+51.

Constraining Brans–Dicke Cosmology with the CSST Galaxy Clustering Spectroscopic Survey

The Brans-Dicke(BD)theory is the simplest Scalar-Tensor theory of gravity,which can be considered as a candidate of modified Einstein’s theory of general relativity.In this work,we forecast the constraints on BD theory in the CSST galaxy clustering spectroscopic survey with a magnitude limit~23 AB mag for point-source 5σdetection.We generate mock data based on the zCOSMOS catalog and consider the observational and instrumental effects of the CSST spectroscopic survey.We predict galaxy power spectra in the BD theory from z=0 to 1.5,and the galaxy bias and other systematical parameters are also included.The Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique is employed to find the best-fits and probability distributions of the cosmological and systematical parameters.A BD parameterζis introduced,which satisfiesζ=In(1+(1/ω)).We find that the CSST spectroscopic galaxy clustering survey can give|ξ|<10^(-2),or equivalently|ω|>O(10^(2))and|■/G|<10^(-13),under the assumptionζ=0.These constraints are almost at the same order of magnitude compared to the joint constraints using the current cosmic microwave background,baryon acoustic oscillations and TypeⅠa supernova data,indicating that the CSST galaxy clustering spectroscopic survey would be powerful for constraining the BD theory and other modified gravity theories.

The FRB-searching Pipeline of the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder Array

This paper presents the design,calibration,and survey strategy of the Fast Radio Burst(FRB)digital backend and its real-time data processing pipeline employed in the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder Array.The array,consisting of three parallel cylindrical reflectors and equipped with 96 dual-polarization feeds,is a radio interferometer array designed for conducting drift scans of the northern celestial semi-sphere.The FRB digital backend enables the formation of 96 digital beams,effectively covering an area of approximately 40 square degrees with the 3 dB beam.Our pipeline demonstrates the capability to conduct an automatic search of FRBs,detecting at quasi-realtime and classifying FRB candidates automatically.The current FRB searching pipeline has an overall recall rate of88%.During the commissioning phase,we successfully detected signals emitted by four well-known pulsars:PSR B0329+54,B2021+51,B0823+26,and B2020+28.We report the first discovery of an FRB by our array,designated as FRB 20220414A.We also investigate the optimal arrangement for the digitally formed beams to achieve maximum detection rate by numerical simulation.

A high-resolution self-consistent whole sky foreground model

The neutral hydrogen 21 cm line is potentially a very powerful probe of the observable universe, and a number of on-going experiments are trying to detect it at cosmological distances. However, the presence of strong foreground radiations such as the galactic synchrotron radiation, galactic free-free emission and extragalactic radio sources make it a very challenging task.For the design of 21 cm experiments and analysis of their data, simulation is an essential tool, and good sky foreground model is needed. With existing data the whole sky maps are available only in low angular resolutions or for limited patches of sky,which is inadequate in the simulation of these new 21 cm experiments. In this paper, we present the method of constructing a high resolution self-consistent sky model at low frequencies, which incorporates both diffuse foreground and point sources.Our diffuse map is constructed by generating physical foreground components including the galactic synchrotron emission and galactic free-free emission. The point source sample is generated using the actual data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey(NVSS)and the Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey(SUMSS) where they are available and complete in flux limit, and mock point sources according to statistical distributions. The entire model is made self-consistent by removing the integrated flux of the point sources from the diffuse map so that this part of radiation is not double counted. We show that with the point sources added, a significant angular power is introduced in the mock sky map, which may be important for foreground subtraction simulations.Our sky maps and point source catalogues are available to download.

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.