Frequency Phase Transfer for Future Millimetre Arrays with Arbitrary Frequency Ratios

Abstract

Non-dispersive tropospheric turbulence-induced phase delays enforce significant, often dominant, limitations to the imaging fidelity and dynamic range in (sub-)millimetre astronomy. Frequency Phase Transfer (FPT), which removes such delays from high-frequency data using simultaneous lower-frequency observations, has become increasingly viable with the advent of shared-optical-path multi-band receivers and is a key motivator of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration's ambitions to add 86-GHz and 345-GHz bands alongside its existing 230-GHz band. However, existing FPT algorithms break down for non-integer frequency ratios, leaving jump discontinuities in the residual phases. We introduce a new FPT algorithm, phase-wrap counting (PWC), which works for any frequency ratio and clarifies the nature and source of the jump discontinuities left by previous FPT approaches. Using the newly developed High-frequency Inter-band Transfer of Phase Solutions (HITOPS) software package, we apply PWC to a simulated dual-band observation with the Event Horizon Telescope and demonstrate its effectiveness under realistic atmospheric conditions and thermal noise levels. The method successfully calibrates the 230-GHz phases using the 86-GHz phase solutions, outperforming the conventional phase calibration approach in both coherence and peak flux recovery. This result indicates that PWC has the potential to enable the calibration of the 230-GHz band using the 86-GHz band in future EHT operations.