arXiv subjects

Abraham R. Neben

Publications and source records attributed to Abraham R. Neben.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Detection of Cosmic Structures using the Bispectrum Phase. II. First Results from Application to Cosmic Reionization Using the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array

Characterizing the epoch of reionization (EoR) at $z\gtrsim 6$ via the redshifted 21 cm line of neutral Hydrogen (HI) 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 HI fluctuations while largely avoiding calibration systematics. Here, we provide a demonstration of this technique on a subset of data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) to place approximate constraints on the brightness temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM). From this limited data, at $z=7.7$ we infer "$1σ$" upper limits on the IGM brightness temperature to be $\le 316$ "pseudo" mK at $κ_\parallel=0.33$ "pseudo" $h$ Mpc$^{-1}$ (data-limited) and $\le 1000$ "pseudo" mK at $κ_\parallel=0.875$ "pseudo" $h$ Mpc$^{-1}$ (noise-limited). The "pseudo" units denote only an approximate and not an exact correspondence to the actual distance scales and brightness temperatures. By propagating models in parallel to the data analysis, we confirm that the dynamic range required to separate the cosmic HI signal from the foregrounds is similar to that in standard approaches, and the power spectrum of the bispectrum phase is still data-limited (at $\gtrsim 10^6$ dynamic range) indicating scope for further improvement in sensitivity as the array build-out continues.

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arXiv2020

Measuring HERA's primary beam in-situ: methodology and first results

The central challenge in 21~cm cosmology is isolating the cosmological signal from bright foregrounds. Many separation techniques rely on the accurate knowledge of the sky and the instrumental response, including the antenna primary beam. For drift-scan telescopes such as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array \citep[HERA, ][]{DeBoer2017} that do not move, primary beam characterization is particularly challenging because standard beam-calibration routines do not apply \citep{Cornwell2005} and current techniques require accurate source catalogs at the telescope resolution. We present an extension of the method from \citet{Pober2012} where they use beam symmetries to create a network of overlapping source tracks that break the degeneracy between source flux density and beam response and allow their simultaneous estimation. We fit the beam response of our instrument using early HERA observations and find that our results agree well with electromagnetic simulations down to a -20~dB level in power relative to peak gain for sources with high signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, we construct a source catalog with 90 sources down to a flux density of 1.4~Jy at 151~MHz.

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arXiv2020

Foreground modelling via Gaussian process regression: an application to HERA data

The key challenge in the observation of the redshifted 21-cm signal from cosmic reionization is its separation from the much brighter foreground emission. Such separation relies on the different spectral properties of the two components, although, in real life, the foreground intrinsic spectrum is often corrupted by the instrumental response, inducing systematic effects that can further jeopardize the measurement of the 21-cm signal. In this paper, we use Gaussian Process Regression to model both foreground emission and instrumental systematics in $\sim 2$ hours of data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array. We find that a simple co-variance model with three components matches the data well, giving a residual power spectrum with white noise properties. These consist of an "intrinsic" and instrumentally corrupted component with a coherence-scale of 20 MHz and 2.4 MHz respectively (dominating the line of sight power spectrum over scales $k_{\parallel} \le 0.2$ h cMpc$^{-1}$) and a baseline dependent periodic signal with a period of $\sim 1$ MHz (dominating over $k_{\parallel} \sim 0.4 - 0.8$h cMpc$^{-1}$) which should be distinguishable from the 21-cm EoR signal whose typical coherence-scales is $\sim 0.8$ MHz.

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arXiv2020

Absolute Calibration Strategies for the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array and Their Impact on the 21 cm Power Spectrum

We discuss absolute calibration strategies for Phase I of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), which aims to measure the cosmological 21 cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). HERA is a drift-scan array with a 10 degree wide field of view, meaning bright, well-characterized point source transits are scarce. This, combined with HERA's redundant sampling of the uv plane and the modest angular resolution of the Phase I instrument, make traditional sky-based and self-calibration techniques difficult to implement with high dynamic range. Nonetheless, in this work we demonstrate calibration for HERA using point source catalogues and electromagnetic simulations of its primary beam. We show that unmodeled diffuse flux and instrumental contaminants can corrupt the gain solutions, and present a gain smoothing approach for mitigating their impact on the 21 cm power spectrum. We also demonstrate a hybrid sky and redundant calibration scheme and compare it to pure sky-based calibration, showing only a marginal improvement to the gain solutions at intermediate delay scales. Our work suggests that the HERA Phase I system can be well-calibrated for a foreground-avoidance power spectrum estimator by applying direction-independent gains with a small set of degrees of freedom across the frequency and time axes.

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arXiv2019

Mitigating Internal Instrument Coupling II: A Method Demonstration with the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array

We present a study of internal reflection and cross coupling systematics in Phase I of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). In a companion paper, we outlined the mathematical formalism for such systematics and presented algorithms for modeling and removing them from the data. In this work, we apply these techniques to data from HERA's first observing season as a method demonstration. The data show evidence for systematics that, without removal, would hinder a detection of the 21 cm power spectrum for the targeted EoR line-of-sight modes in the range 0.2 < k_parallel < 0.5\ h^-1 Mpc. After systematic removal, we find we can recover these modes in the power spectrum down to the integrated noise-floor of a nightly observation, achieving a dynamic range in the EoR window of 10^-6 in power (mK^2 units) with respect to the bright galactic foreground signal. In the absence of other systematics and assuming the systematic suppression demonstrated here continues to lower noise levels, our results suggest that fully-integrated HERA Phase I may have the capacity to set competitive upper limits on the 21 cm power spectrum. For future observing seasons, HERA will have upgraded analog and digital hardware to better control these systematics in the field.

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arXiv2019

The HERA-19 Commissioning Array: Direction Dependent Effects

Foreground power dominates the measurements of interferometers that seek a statistical detection of highly-redshifted HI emission from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). The chromaticity of the instrument creates a boundary in the Fourier transform of frequency (proportional to $k_\parallel$) between spectrally smooth emission, characteristic of the strong synchrotron foreground (the "wedge"), and the spectrally structured emission from HI in the EoR (the "EoR window"). Faraday rotation can inject spectral structure into otherwise smooth polarized foreground emission, which through instrument effects or miscalibration could possibly pollute the EoR window. Using data from the HERA 19-element commissioning array, we investigate the polarization response of this new instrument in the power spectrum domain. We perform a simple image-based calibration based on the unpolarized diffuse emission of the Global Sky Model, and show that it achieves qualitative redundancy between the nominally-redundant baselines of the array and reasonable amplitude accuracy. We construct power spectra of all fully polarized coherencies in all pseudo-Stokes parameters. We compare to simulations based on an unpolarized diffuse sky model and detailed electromagnetic simulations of the dish and feed, confirming that in Stokes I, the calibration does not add significant spectral structure beyond the expected level. Further, this calibration is stable over the 8 days of observations considered. Excess power is seen in the power spectra of the linear polarization Stokes parameters which is not easily attributable to leakage via the primary beam, and results from some combination of residual calibration errors and actual polarized emission. Stokes V is found to be highly discrepant from the expectation of zero power, strongly pointing to the need for more accurate polarized calibration.

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arXiv2019

Optimizing Sparse RFI Prediction using Deep Learning

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is an ever-present limiting factor among radio telescopes even in the most remote observing locations. When looking to retain the maximum amount of sensitivity and reduce contamination for Epoch of Reionization studies, the identification and removal of RFI is especially important. In addition to improved RFI identification, we must also take into account computational efficiency of the RFI-Identification algorithm as radio interferometer arrays such as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array grow larger in number of receivers. To address this, we present a Deep Fully Convolutional Neural Network (DFCN) that is comprehensive in its use of interferometric data, where both amplitude and phase information are used jointly for identifying RFI. We train the network using simulated HERA visibilities containing mock RFI, yielding a known "ground truth" dataset for evaluating the accuracy of various RFI algorithms. Evaluation of the DFCN model is performed on observations from the 67 dish build-out, HERA-67, and achieves a data throughput of 1.6$\times 10^{5}$ HERA time-ordered 1024 channeled visibilities per hour per GPU. We determine that relative to an amplitude only network including visibility phase adds important adjacent time-frequency context which increases discrimination between RFI and Non-RFI. The inclusion of phase when predicting achieves a Recall of 0.81, Precision of 0.58, and $F_{2}$ score of 0.75 as applied to our HERA-67 observations.

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arXiv2018

HI 21cm Cosmology and the Bi-spectrum: Closure Diagnostics in Massively Redundant Interferometric Arrays

New massively redundant low frequency arrays allow for a novel investigation of closure relations in interferometry. We employ commissioning data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array to investigate closure quantities in this densely packed grid array of 14m antennas operating at 100 MHz to 200 MHz. We investigate techniques that utilize closure phase spectra for redundant triads to estimate departures from redundancy for redundant baseline visibilities. We find a median absolute deviation from redundancy in closure phase across the observed frequency range of about 4.5deg. This value translates into a non-redundancy per visibility phase of about 2.6deg, using prototype electronics. The median absolute deviations from redundancy decrease with longer baselines. We show that closure phase spectra can be used to identify ill-behaved antennas in the array, independent of calibration. We investigate the temporal behavior of closure spectra. The Allan variance increases after a one minute stride time, due to passage of the sky through the primary beam of the transit telescope. However, the closure spectra repeat to well within the noise per measurement at corresponding local sidereal times (LST) from day to day. In future papers in this series we will develop the technique of using closure phase spectra in the search for the HI 21cm signal from cosmic reionization.

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arXiv2017

Foreground and sensitivity analysis for broad band (2D) 21cm--Ly-alpha and 21cm--H-alpha correlation experiments probing the Epoch of Reionization

A detection of the predicted anticorrelation between 21cm and either Ly-alpha or H-alpha from the Epoch of Reionization (EOR) would be a powerful probe of the first galaxies. While 3D intensity maps isolate foregrounds in low k_\parallel modes, infrared surveys cannot yet match the field of view and redshift resolution of radio intensity mapping experiments. In contrast, 2D (i.e., broad band) infrared intensity maps can be measured with current experiments and are limited by foregrounds instead of photon or thermal noise. We show 2D experiments can measure most of the 3D fluctuation power at k<0.2 Mpc^-1 while preserving its correlation properties. However, we show foregrounds pose two challenges: (1) simple geometric effects produce percent-level correlations between radio and infrared fluxes, even if their luminosities are uncorrelated; and (2) radio and infrared foreground residuals contribute sample variance noise to the cross spectrum. The first challenge demands better foreground masking and subtraction, while the second demands large fields of view to average away uncorrelated radio and infrared power. Using radio observations from the Murchison Widefield Array and near-infrared observations from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, we set an upper limit on residual foregrounds of the 21cm--Ly-alpha cross power spectrum at z\sim7 of Δ^2<181 kJy/sr * mK (95\%) at \ell\sim800. We predict levels of foreground correlation and sample variance noise in future experiments, showing that higher resolution surveys such as LOFAR, SKA-LOW, and the Dark Energy Survey can start to probe models of the 21cm--LyαEOR cross spectrum.

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arXiv2017

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array Dish III: Measuring Chromaticity of Prototype Element with Reflectometry

The experimental efforts to detect the redshifted 21 cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) are limited predominantly by the chromatic instrumental systematic effect. The delay spectrum methodology for 21 cm power spectrum measurements brought new attention to the critical impact of an antenna's chromaticity on the viability of making this measurement. This methodology established a straightforward relationship between time-domain response of an instrument and the power spectrum modes accessible to a 21 cm EoR experiment. We examine the performance of a prototype of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) array element that is currently observing in Karoo desert, South Africa. We present a mathematical framework to derive the beam integrated frequency response of a HERA prototype element in reception from the return loss measurements between 100-200 MHz and determined the extent of additional foreground contamination in the delay space. The measurement reveals excess spectral structures in comparison to the simulation studies of the HERA element. Combined with the HERA data analysis pipeline that incorporates inverse covariance weighting in optimal quadratic estimation of power spectrum, we find that in spite of its departure from the simulated response, HERA prototype element satisfies the necessary criteria posed by the foreground attenuation limits and potentially can measure the power spectrum at spatial modes as low as $k_{\parallel} > 0.1h$~Mpc$^{-1}$. The work highlights a straightforward method for directly measuring an instrument response and assessing its impact on 21 cm EoR power spectrum measurements for future experiments that will use reflector-type antenna.

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arXiv2016

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array Dish I: Beam Pattern Measurements and Science Implications

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) is a radio interferometer aiming to detect the power spectrum of 21 cm fluctuations from neutral hydrogen from the Epoch of Reionization (EOR). Drawing on lessons from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER), HERA is a hexagonal array of large (14 m diameter) dishes with suspended dipole feeds. Not only does the dish determine overall sensitivity, it affects the observed frequency structure of foregrounds in the interferometer. This is the first of a series of four papers characterizing the frequency and angular response of the dish with simulations and measurements. We focus in this paper on the angular response (i.e., power pattern), which sets the relative weighting between sky regions of high and low delay, and thus, apparent source frequency structure. We measure the angular response at 137 MHz using the ORBCOMM beam mapping system of Neben et al. We measure a collecting area of 93 m^2 in the optimal dish/feed configuration, implying HERA-320 should detect the EOR power spectrum at z~9 with a signal-to-noise ratio of 12.7 using a foreground avoidance approach with a single season of observations, and 74.3 using a foreground subtraction approach. Lastly we study the impact of these beam measurements on the distribution of foregrounds in Fourier space.

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arXiv2016

The External Calibrator for Hydrogen Observatories

Multiple instruments are pursuing constraints on dark energy, observing reionization and opening a window on the dark ages through the detection and characterization of the 21cm hydrogen line across the redshift spectrum, from nearby to z=25. These instruments, including CHIME in the sub-meter and HERA in the meter bands, are wide-field arrays with multiple-degree beams, typically operating in transit mode. Accurate knowledge of their primary beams is critical for separation of bright foregrounds from the desired cosmological signals, but difficult to achieve through astronomical observations alone. Previous beam calibration work has focused on model verification and does not address the need of 21cm experiments for routine beam mapping, to the horizon, of the as-built array. We describe the design and methodology of a drone-mounted calibrator, the External Calibrator for Hydrogen Observatories (ECHO), that aims to address this need. We report on a first set of trials to calibrate low-frequency dipoles and compare ECHO measurements to an established beam-mapping system based on transmissions from the Orbcomm satellite constellation. We create beam maps of two dipoles at a 9-degree resolution and find sample noise ranging from 1 to 2%. Assuming this sample noise represents the error in the measurement, the higher end of this range is roughly twice the desired requirement. The overall performance of ECHO suggests that the desired precision and angular coverage is achievable in practice with modest improvements. We identify the main sources of systematic error and uncertainty in our measurements and describe the steps needed to overcome them.

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arXiv2016

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array Dish II: Characterization of Spectral Structure with Electromagnetic Simulations and its science Implications

We use time-domain electromagnetic simulations to determine the spectral characteristics of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Arrays (HERA) antenna. These simulations are part of a multi-faceted campaign to determine the effectiveness of the dish's design for obtaining a detection of redshifted 21 cm emission from the epoch of reionization. Our simulations show the existence of reflections between HERA's suspended feed and its parabolic dish reflector that fall below -40 dB at 150 ns and, for reasonable impedance matches, have a negligible impact on HERA's ability to constrain EoR parameters. It follows that despite the reflections they introduce, dishes are effective for increasing the sensitivity of EoR experiments at relatively low cost. We find that electromagnetic resonances in the HERA feed's cylindrical skirt, which is intended to reduce cross coupling and beam ellipticity, introduces significant power at large delays ($-40$ dB at 200 ns) which can lead to some loss of measurable Fourier modes and a modest reduction in sensitivity. Even in the presence of this structure, we find that the spectral response of the antenna is sufficiently smooth for delay filtering to contain foreground emission at line-of-sight wave numbers below $k_\parallel \lesssim 0.2$ $h$Mpc$^{-1}$, in the region where the current PAPER experiment operates. Incorporating these results into a Fisher Matrix analysis, we find that the spectral structure observed in our simulations has only a small effect on the tight constraints HERA can achieve on parameters associated with the astrophysics of reionization.

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arXiv2016

Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) is a staged experiment to measure 21 cm emission from the primordial intergalactic medium (IGM) throughout cosmic reionization ($z=6-12$), and to explore earlier epochs of our Cosmic Dawn ($z\sim30$). During these epochs, early stars and black holes heated and ionized the IGM, introducing fluctuations in 21 cm emission. HERA is designed to characterize the evolution of the 21 cm power spectrum to constrain the timing and morphology of reionization, the properties of the first galaxies, the evolution of large-scale structure, and the early sources of heating. The full HERA instrument will be a 350-element interferometer in South Africa consisting of 14-m parabolic dishes observing from 50 to 250 MHz. Currently, 19 dishes have been deployed on site and the next 18 are under construction. HERA has been designated as an SKA Precursor instrument. In this paper, we summarize HERA's scientific context and provide forecasts for its key science results. After reviewing the current state of the art in foreground mitigation, we use the delay-spectrum technique to motivate high-level performance requirements for the HERA instrument. Next, we present the HERA instrument design, along with the subsystem specifications that ensure that HERA meets its performance requirements. Finally, we summarize the schedule and status of the project. We conclude by suggesting that, given the realities of foreground contamination, current-generation 21 cm instruments are approaching their sensitivity limits. HERA is designed to bring both the sensitivity and the precision to deliver its primary science on the basis of proven foreground filtering techniques, while developing new subtraction techniques to unlock new capabilities. The result will be a major step toward realizing the widely recognized scientific potential of 21 cm cosmology.

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arXiv2015

Empirical Covariance Modeling for 21 cm Power Spectrum Estimation: A Method Demonstration and New Limits from Early Murchison Widefield Array 128-Tile Data

The separation of the faint cosmological background signal from bright astrophysical foregrounds remains one of the most daunting challenges of mapping the high-redshift intergalactic medium with the redshifted 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. Advances in mapping and modeling of diffuse and point source foregrounds have improved subtraction accuracy, but no subtraction scheme is perfect. Precisely quantifying the errors and error correlations due to missubtracted foregrounds allows for both the rigorous analysis of the 21 cm power spectrum and for the maximal isolation of the "EoR window" from foreground contamination. We present a method to infer the covariance of foreground residuals from the data itself in contrast to previous attempts at a priori modeling. We demonstrate our method by setting limits on the power spectrum using a 3 h integration from the 128-tile Murchison Widefield Array. Observing between 167 and 198 MHz, we find at 95% confidence a best limit of Delta^2(k) < 3.7 x 10^4 mK^2 at comoving scale k = 0.18 hMpc^-1 and at z = 6.8, consistent with existing limits.

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arXiv2015

Mapmaking for Precision 21 cm Cosmology

In order to study the "Cosmic Dawn" and the Epoch of Reionization with 21 cm tomography, we need to statistically separate the cosmological signal from foregrounds known to be orders of magnitude brighter. Over the last few years, we have learned much about the role our telescopes play in creating a putatively foreground-free region called the "EoR window." In this work, we examine how an interferometer's effects can be taken into account in a way that allows for the rigorous estimation of 21 cm power spectra from interferometric maps while mitigating foreground contamination and thus increasing sensitivity. This requires a precise understanding of the statistical relationship between the maps we make and the underlying true sky. While some of these calculations would be computationally infeasible if performed exactly, we explore several well-controlled approximations that make mapmaking and the calculation of map statistics much faster, especially for compact and highly redundant interferometers designed specifically for 21 cm cosmology. We demonstrate the utility of these methods and the parametrized trade-offs between accuracy and speed using one such telescope, the upcoming Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, as a case study.

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arXiv2014

MITEoR: A Scalable Interferometer for Precision 21 cm Cosmology

We report on the MIT Epoch of Reionization (MITEoR) experiment, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that improve the calibration precision and reduce the cost of the high-sensitivity 3D mapping required for 21 cm cosmology. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy, which enables both automated precision calibration and correlator cost reduction. We demonstrate and quantify the power and robustness of redundancy for scalability and precision. We find that the calibration parameters precisely describe the effect of the instrument upon our measurements, allowing us to form a model that is consistent with $χ^2$ per degree of freedom < 1.2 for as much as 80% of the observations. We use these results to develop an optimal estimator of calibration parameters using Wiener filtering, and explore the question of how often and how finely in frequency visibilities must be reliably measured to solve for calibration coefficients. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) project and other next-generation instruments, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies.

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arXiv2013

Mapping our Universe in 3D with MITEoR

Mapping our universe in 3D by imaging the redshifted 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen has the potential to overtake the cosmic microwave background as our most powerful cosmological probe, because it can map a much larger volume of our Universe, shedding new light on the epoch of reionization, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and neutrino masses. We report on MITEoR, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that greatly reduce the cost of such 3D mapping for a given sensitivity. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy both to enable automated precision calibration and to cut the correlator cost scaling from N^2 to NlogN, where N is the number of antennas. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious HERA project, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies using an order of magnitude more antennas, each with dramatically larger collecting area.

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