Overcoming real-world obstacles in 21 cm power spectrum estimation: A method demonstration and results from early Murchison Widefield Array data

By J. Dillon, Adrian Liu, Christopher L. Williams, Jacqueline N. Hewitt, Max Tegmark, E. Morgan, A. Levine, Miguel F. Morales, Steven J. Tingay, G. Bernardi and 9 more. 2013

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present techniques for bridging the gap between idealized inverse covariance weighted quadratic estimation of 21 cm power spectra and the real-world challenges presented universally by interferometric observation. By carefully evaluating various estimators and adapting our techniques for large but incomplete data sets, we develop a robust power spectrum estimation framework that preserves the so-called \EoR window" and keeps track of estimator errors and covariances. We apply our method to observations from the 32-tile prototype of the Murchinson Wideeld Array to demonstrate the importance of a judicious analysis technique. Lastly, we apply our method to investigate the dependence of the clean EoR window on frequency|especially the frequency dependence of the so-called \wedge" feature|and establish upper limits on the power spectrum from z = 6:2 to z = 11:7. Our lowest limit is

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8236f8e52150968f1d27a5ba2e04c2242c3029fb

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Citations in the corpus

FIRST SEASON MWA EOR POWER SPECTRUM RESULTS AT REDSHIFT 7 (2016, methodology): “Using the first generation of instruments, several upper limits have been placed on the 21 cm EoR signal (Ali et al. 2015; Dillon et al. 2014; Parsons et al. 2014; Jacobs et al. 2015; Paciga et al. 2013).”
Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) (2016, background): “PAPER and the MWA have produced progressively deeper limits (Dillon et al. 2014, 2015a; Parsons et al. 2014; Ali et al. 2015), with PAPER yielding the first meaningful constraints on the 21 cm spin temperature during reionization.”
Modeling the Radio Background from the First Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the 21 cm Absorption Amplitude (2018, methodology): “Interferometric experiments seeking to measure the power spectrum include the GMRT (Paciga et al. 2013), the MWA (Dillon et al. 2014; Beardsley et al. 2016; Ewall-Wice et al. 2016; Jacobs et al. 2016; Trott et al. 2016), PAPER (Parsons et al. 2014; Ali et al. 2015; Jacobs et al. 2015), LOFAR (Patil ”