The future of radio astronomy will require instruments with large collecting areas for higher sensitivity, wide fields of view for faster survey speeds, and efficient computing and data rates relative to current capabilities. We describe the first successful deployment of the E-field Parallel Imaging Correlator (EPIC) on the LWA station in Sevilleta, New Mexico, USA (LWA-SV). EPIC is a solution to the computational problem of large interferometers. By gridding and spatially Fourier transforming channelised electric fields from the antennas in real-time, EPIC removes the explicit cross multiplication of all pairs of antenna voltages to synthesize an aperture, reducing the computational scaling from O(n 2 a ) to O(n g log 2 n g ), where n a is the number of antennas and n g is the number of grid points. Not only does this save computational costs for dense arrays but it produces very high time resolution images in real time. The GPU-based implementation uses existing LWA-SV hardware and the high performance streaming framework, Bifrost. We examine the practical details of the EPIC deployment and verify the imaging performance by detecting a meteor impact on the atmosphere using continuous all-sky imaging at 50 ms time resolution.
We analyze data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). This is the third in a series of papers on the closure phase delay spectrum technique designed to detect the H I 21 cm emission from cosmic reionization. We present the details of the data and models employed in the power spectral analysis and discuss limitations to the process. We compare images and visibility spectra made with HERA data to parallel quantities generated from sky models based on the Galactic and Extra-Galactic All-Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, incorporating the HERA telescope model. We find reasonable agreement between images made from HERA data with those generated from the models, down to the confusion level. For the visibility spectra, there is broad agreement between model and data across the full band of ∼80 MHz. However, models with only GLEAM sources do not reproduce a roughly sinusoidal spectral structure at the tens of percent level seen in the observed visibility spectra on scales of ∼10 MHz on 29 m baselines. We find that this structure is likely due to diffuse Galactic emission, predominantly the Galactic plane, filling the far sidelobes of the antenna primary beam. We show that our current knowledge of the frequency dependence of the diffuse sky radio emission, and the primary beam at large zenith angles, is inadequate to provide an accurate reproduction of the diffuse structure in the models. We discuss some implications arising due to this missing structure in the models, in terms of calibration, and in the search for the H I 21 cm signal, as well as possible mitigation techniques.
Characterizing the epoch of reionization (EoR) at z ≳ 6 via the redshifted 21 cm line of neutral Hydrogen (H I) is critical to modern astrophysics and cosmology, and thus a key science goal of many current and planned low-frequency radio telescopes. The primary challenge to detecting this signal is the overwhelmingly bright foreground emission at these frequencies, placing stringent requirements on the knowledge of the instruments and inaccuracies in analyses. Results from these experiments have largely been limited not by thermal sensitivity but by systematics, particularly caused by the inability to calibrate the instrument to high accuracy. The interferometric bispectrum phase is immune to antenna-based calibration and errors therein, and presents an independent alternative to detect the EoR H I fluctuations while largely avoiding *
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