A Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for the Multi-Frequency Angular Power Spectrum (MAPS) and the Cosmological HI 21-cm Power Spectrum

Abstract

In this work we present a new approach to estimate the power spectrum $P({\bf k})$ of redshifted HI 21-cm brightness temperature fluctuations. The MAPS $C_{\ell}(ν_a,ν_b)$ completely quantifies the second order statistics of the sky signal under the assumption that the signal is statistically homogeneous and isotropic on the sky. Here we generalize an already existing visibility based estimator for $C_{\ell}$, namely TGE, to develop an estimator for $C_{\ell}(ν_a,ν_b)$. The 21-cm power spectrum is the Fourier transform of $C_{\ell}(Δν)$ with respect to $Δν=\mid ν_a-ν_b \mid$, and we use this to estimate $P({\bf k})$. Using simulations of $150 \, {\rm MHz}$ GMRT observations, we find that this estimator is able to recover $P(k)$ with an accuracy of $5-20 \%$ over a reasonably large $k$ range even when the data in $80 \%$ randomly chosen frequency channels is flagged.