OPENING THE 21 cm EPOCH OF REIONIZATION WINDOW: MEASUREMENTS OF FOREGROUND ISOLATION WITH PAPER

By Jonathan C. Pober, Aaron Parsons, J. Aguirre, Z. Ali, R. Bradley, C. Carilli, D. DeBoer, M. Dexter, N. Gugliucci, Daniel C. Jacobs and 6 more. 2013

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present new observations with the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization with the aim of measuring the properties of foreground emission for 21 cm epoch of reionization (EoR) experiments at 150 MHz. We focus on the footprint of the foregrounds in cosmological Fourier space to understand which modes of the 21 cm power spectrum will most likely be compromised by foreground emission. These observations confirm predictions that foregrounds can be isolated to a “wedge”-like region of two-dimensional (k⊥, k∥)-space, creating a window for cosmological studies at higher k∥ values. We also find that the emission extends past the nominal edge of this wedge due to spectral structure in the foregrounds, with this feature most prominent on the shortest baselines. Finally, we filter the data to retain only this “unsmooth” emission and image its specific k∥ modes. The resultant images show an excess of power at the lowest modes, but no emission can be clearly localized to any one region of the sky. This image is highly suggestive that the most problematic foregrounds for 21 cm EoR studies will not be easily identifiable bright sources, but rather an aggregate of fainter emission.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8c6bc1706f11204213141810f1eef2b2b87aff3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

WHAT NEXT-GENERATION 21 cm POWER SPECTRUM MEASUREMENTS CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION (2013, methodology): “For an instrument model, we used the ∼ 0.1 km2 HERA concept array, and calculated power spectrum sensitivities using the method of Pober et al. (2013b).”
New Limits on 21cm EoR From PAPER-32 Consistent with an X-Ray Heated IGM at z=7.7 (2013, background): “The details of these observations and their calibration are given in Jacobs et al. (2013) and Pober et al. (2013).”
Determination of z ∼ 0.8 neutral hydrogen fluctuations using the 21 cm intensity mapping autocorrelation (2013, methodology): “Several experiments, including BAOBAB (Pober et al. 2013b), BAORadio (Ansari et al. 2012b), BINGO (Battye et al. 2012), CHIME1 and TianLai (Chen 2012) propose to conduct redshift surveys fromz ∼ 0.5 to 2.5 using this method.”
Inhomogeneous recombinations during cosmic reionization (2014, background): “During the second half of reionization, recombinations suppress the power spectra by ∼> 50–100% (RnF vs nRnF) on the k ∼ 0.1 Mpc −1 scales relevant for current 21cm interferometers (e.g. Pober et al. 2013; Mesinger et al. 2013).”
Calibration requirements for detecting the 21 cm epoch of reionization power spectrum and implications for the SKA (2016, background): “…wedge” due to the mode-mixing of power from small k‖ values into larger k‖ values as demonstrated in Figure 1 (Datta et al. 2010; Morales et al. 2012; Vedantham et al. 2012; Parsons et al. 2012b; Trott et al. 2012; Hazelton et al. 2013; Thyagarajan et al. 2013; Pober et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2014).”
FIRST SEASON MWA EOR POWER SPECTRUM RESULTS AT REDSHIFT 7 (2016, background): “…from spectrally smooth foregrounds to higher Fourier modes (Thyagarajan et al. 2015a,b; Trott et al. 2012; Liu et al. 2014a,b; Hazelton et al. 2013; Pober et al. 2013; Thyagarajan et al. 2013; Vedantham et al. 2012; Morales et al. 2012; Datta et al. 2010), while others are investigating the…”
PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS ON REIONIZATION: THE 21 cm POWER SPECTRUM AT z = 8.4 (2015, unknown): “This relationship, known colloquially as “the wedge,” was derived analytically (P12b; Vedantham et al. 2012; Thyagarajan et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2014a,b), and has been confirmed in simulations (Datta et al. 2010; Hazelton et al. 2013) and observationally (Pober et al. 2013; Dillon et al. 2014).”
Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) (2016, methodology): “…work (Datta et al. 2010; Morales et al. 2012; Parsons et al. 2012b; Vedantham et al. 2012; Thyagarajan et al. 2013; Hazelton et al. 2013; Pober et al. 2013a; Liu et al. 2014a,b), we have learned how the boundary between the wedge and the EoR window is determined by the separation…”
The Giant Gemini GMOS survey of zem > 4.4 quasars – I. Measuring the mean free path across cosmic time (2014, background): “…O bservatory L ibrary on O ctober 21, 2014 http://m nras.oxfordjournals.org/ D hyperfine transition (e.g. Zaroubi et al. 2012; Beardsley et al. 2013; Pober et al. 2013; Yatawatta et al. 2013), researchers have been studying effects of reionization on the IGM in absorption through spectroscopy of…”