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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.