The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array: design, operation and performance of a prototype transit radio interferometer
Fengquan Wu, Jixia Li, Shifan Zuo, Xuelei Chen, Santanu Das, John P. Marriner, Trevor M. Oxholm, Anh Phan, Albert Stebbins, Peter T. Timbie, Reza Ansari, Jean-E… 展开作者
Fengquan Wu, Jixia Li, Shifan Zuo, Xuelei Chen, Santanu Das, John P. Marriner, Trevor M. Oxholm, Anh Phan, Albert Stebbins, Peter T. Timbie, Reza Ansari, Jean-Eric Campagne, Zhiping Chen, Yanping Cong, Qizhi Huang, Yichao Li, Tao Liu, Yingfeng Liu, Chenhui Niu, Calvin Osinga, Olivier Perdereau, Jeffrey B. Peterson, Huli Shi, Gage Siebert, Shijie Sun, Haijun Tian, Gregory S. Tucker, Qunxiong Wang, Rongli Wang, Yougang Wang, Yanlin Wu, Yidong Xu, Kaifeng Yu, Zijie Yu, Jiao Zhang, Juyong Zhang, Jialu Zhu
The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array is a radio interferometer designed to test techniques for 21~cm intensity mapping in the post-reionization universe as a means for measuring large-scale cosmic structure. It performs drift scans of the sky at constant declination. We describe the design, calibration, noise level, and stability of this instrument based on the analysis of about $\sim 5 \%$ of 6,200 hours of on-sky observations through October, 2019. Beam pattern determinations using drones and the transit of bright sources are in good agreement, and compatible with electromagnetic simulations. Combining all the baselines, we make maps around bright sources and show that the array behaves as expected. A few hundred hours of observations at different declinations have been used to study the array geometry and pointing imperfections, as well as the instrument noise behaviour. We show that the system temperature is below 80~K for most feed antennas, and that noise fluctuations decrease as expected with integration time, at least up to a few hundred seconds. Analysis of long integrations, from 10 nights of observations of the North Celestial Pole, yielded visibilities with amplitudes of 20-30~mK, consistent with the expected signal from the NCP radio sky with $<10\,$mK precision for $1 ~\mathrm{MHz} \times 1~ \mathrm{min}$ binning. Hi-pass filtering the spectra to remove smooth spectrum signal yields a residual consistent with zero signal at the $0.5\,$mK level.
State Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy and Technology, National Astronomical Observatories, CAS（中国科学院国家天文台射电天文与技术重点实验室）；School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学天文学与空间科学学院）
Beamforming in Interferometer Arrays with Cross-couplings
National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy and Technology, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院射电天文与技术重点实验室）；School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学物理学院）
Overview of the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio Transient Detector (CHORD) Project
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia（意大利国家天体物理研究所射电天文研究所）；Rhodes University（罗德斯大学）；South African Radio Astronomy Observatory（南非射电天文台）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus（不列颠哥伦比亚大学奥肯那根校区）；Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学邓普天文学与天体物理学研究所）；David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学大卫·A·邓普克天文学与天体物理学系）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学安东·潘内库克天文学研究所）；ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所ASTRON）
