arXiv subjects

Quentin Gueuning

Publications and source records attributed to Quentin Gueuning.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Direct Primary Beam Correction: Untangling Mutual Coupling in 21-cm Cosmological Experiments with the SKA-Low Radio Telescope

Mutual coupling between antennas has emerged as the dominant direction-dependent corruption in dense aperture arrays, imprinting pronounced sub-MHz spatial and spectral structure that compromises the time-gating and foreground-separation strategies used to isolate the faint 21-cm signal. In this work, we introduce \textit{Direct Primary Beam Correction}, a domain-agnostic framework for reconstructing the far-field radiation pattern relative to an arbitrary reference via a regularised, direction-weighted linear inversion of stacked Jones matrices, thereby enabling the removal of direction-dependent distortions such as mutual coupling. Using full-wave electromagnetic simulations of SKA-Low, we demonstrate that this framework reconstructs the radiation pattern down to the numerical noise floor within a suitably conditioned field of view, with the reconstruction accuracy governed by the regularised inversion and the fidelity of the underlying beam model. Applying the framework to a simulated 4-hour observation of the EoR0 field in the $122$--$134$~MHz band, we identify two principal implications for 21-cm power-spectrum analysis. First, restricting the correction to the main lobe and near sidelobes is inadequate: chromatic grating lobe contributions, whether left insufficiently or entirely uncorrected, continue to contaminate the EoR window. Second, mutual-coupling-induced contamination is temporally coherent and, being anchored to the fixed array geometry, does not average down across snapshots as the EoR field is tracked. Direct primary beam correction, therefore, provides a computationally efficient means of mitigating mutual coupling; however, robust recovery of the EoR window necessitates either full-sky correction or explicit separation of main-beam and sidelobe contributions prior to power-spectrum estimation.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

Observations of the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization with the SKAO: Observational Lessons Learned from Precursors and Pathfinder Instruments

This chapter summarizes the observational lessons learned after two decades of observations of the Cosmic Dawn (CD) and Epoch of Reionization (EoR) with SKAO pathfinders and precursors. We will describe the effort towards building accurate simulation pipelines for actual observations and summarize the approaches that different groups have taken to calibrate and mitigate systematic effects such as sky model incompleteness, limited instrument models and antenna mutual coupling. We conclude by discussing the impact that these lessons may have on the design and analysis of upcoming SKAO observations of the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization.

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arXiv2026

A Fast Direct Solver for Mutual Coupling Analysis of Large Arrays of Reflector Antennas

Mutual coupling is a dominant systematic effect in dense reflector arrays, imprinting direction-dependent and frequency-dependent structure on embedded element patterns (EEPs) and currently limiting sensitivity in precision radio measurements. Accurate modelling of these effects requires full-wave simulations of structures that are electrically large at both the array and element levels, making conventional approaches computationally prohibitive. We present a Method-of-Moments (MoM) framework accelerated by a fast direct solver (FDS). The rotational symmetry of reflector dishes is exploited to efficiently compress self-interaction blocks of the impedance matrix. Mutual interactions are treated using a broadband multipole decomposition that remains efficient and accurate for closely spaced elements. We demonstrate the method on arrays of tens of reflectors from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescope. To scale to larger arrays, the FDS is used to construct macro-basis functions (MBFs) from a smaller representative array and embed them within a conventional MBF scheme. This allows the first computation of EEPs for the 320-element HERA core on a 128-core workstation.

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arXiv2024

Lowering In-Memory Footprint of Antenna Beams via Polynomial Approximation

With the emergence of new radio telescopes promising larger fields of view at lower observation frequencies (e.g., SKA), addressing direction-dependent effects (DDE) (e.g., direction-specific beam responses), polarisation leakage, and pointing errors has become all the more important. Be it through A-projection or otherwise, addressing said effects often requires reliable representations of antenna/station beams; yet, these require significant amounts of computational memory as they are baseline-, frequency-, time-, and polarisation-dependent. A novel prototype is reported here to approximate antenna beams suitable for SKA-MID using Zernike polynomials. It is shown that beam kernels can be well approximated, paving the way for future optimisations towards facilitating more efficient beam-dependent solutions and approaches to tackling the aforementioned challenges, all of which are essential for large-scale radio telescopes.

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arXiv2024

Primary Beam Chromaticity in HIRAX: I. Characterization from Simulations and Power Spectrum Implications

The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) is an upcoming radio interferometric telescope designed to constrain dark energy through the 21cm intensity mapping of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). Instrumental systematics must be controlled and carefully characterized to measure the 21cm power spectrum with fidelity and achieve high-precision constraints on the cosmological parameters. The chromaticity of the primary beam is one such complicated systematic, which can leak the power of spectrally smooth foregrounds beyond the ideal horizon limits due to the complex spatial and spectral structures of the sidelobes and the mainlobe. This paper studies the chromaticity of the HIRAX Stokes I primary beam and its effects on accurate measurements of the 21cm power spectrum. To investigate the effect of chromaticity in the 21cm power spectrum, we present a physically motivated beam modeling technique, which uses a flexible basis derived from traditional optics that can account for higher-order radial and azimuthal structures in the primary beam. We investigate the impact of imperfect knowledge of the mainlobe and sidelobes chromaticity in the power spectrum space by subtracting a simple foreground model in simulated snapshot visibilities to recover the H$\textsc{i}$ power spectrum. Additionally, we find that modeling up to the octupolar azimuthal order feature (fourth-order angular variation) in the primary beam is sufficient to reduce the leakage outside the wedge with minimal bias.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Uncovering the Effects of Array Mutual Coupling in 21-cm Experiments with the SKA-Low Radio Telescope

We investigate the impact of Mutual Coupling (MC) between antennas on the time-delay power spectrum response of the core of the SKA-Low radio telescope. Using two in-house tools - Fast Array Simulation Tool (FAST) (a fast full-wave electromagnetic solver) and OSKAR (a GPU-accelerated radio telescope simulator) - we simulate station beams and compute visibilities for various array layouts (regular, sunflower, and random). Simulations are conducted in an Epoch of Reionisation subband between 120-150~MHz, with a fine frequency resolution of 100~kHz, enabling the investigation of longer delays. Our results show that MC effects significantly increase foreground leakage into longer delays, especially for regular station layouts. For 21-cm science, foreground spill-over into the 21-cm window extends beyond $k_{\parallel} \sim 2$~h$^{-1}$Mpc for all station layouts and across all $k_{\perp}$ modes, completely obscuring the detection window. We find that attempting to remove the foreground contribution from the visibilities using an approximated beam model, based on the average embedded element pattern or interpolating the embedded element patterns from a coarse channel rate of 781~kHz, results in residuals around 1% ($\sim 10^{11}~\mathrm{mK}^2$h$^{-3}\mathrm{Mpc}^3$) which is still around 7 orders of magnitude brighter than the expected level of the EoR signal ($\sim 10^{4}~\mathrm{mK}^2$h$^{-3}\mathrm{Mpc}^3$). We also find that station beam models with at least 4-5 significant digits in the far-field pattern and high spectral resolution are needed for effective foreground removal. Our research provides critical insights into the role of MC in SKA-Low experiments and highlights the computational challenges of fully integrating array patterns that account for MC effects into processing pipelines.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

A Broadband Multipole Method for Accelerated Mutual Coupling Analysis of Large Irregular Arrays Including Rotated Antennas

We present a numerical method for the analysis of mutual coupling effects in large, dense and irregular arrays with identical antennas. Building on the Method of Moments (MoM), our technique employs a Macro Basis Function (MBF) approach for rapid direct inversion of the MoM impedance matrix. To expedite the reduced matrix filling, we propose an extension of the Steepest-Descent Multipole expansion which remains numerically stable and efficient across a wide bandwidth. This broadband multipole-based approach is well suited to quasi-planar problems and requires only the pre-computation of each MBF's complex patterns, resulting in low antenna-dependent pre-processing costs. The method also supports arrays with arbitrarily rotated antennas at low additional cost. A simulation of all embedded element patterns of irregular arrays of 256 complex log-periodic antennas completes in just 10 minutes per frequency point on a current laptop, with an additional minute per new layout.

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arXiv2020

A beamforming approach to the self-calibration of phased arrays

In this paper, we propose a beamforming method for the calibration of the direction-independent gain of the analog chains of aperture arrays. The gain estimates are obtained by cross-correlating the output voltage of each antenna with a voltage beamformed using the other antennas of the array. When the beamforming weights are equal to the average cross-correlated power, a relation is drawn with the StEFCal algorithm. An example illustrates this approach for few point sources and a 256-element array.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

Fast and Accurate Simulation Technique for Large Irregular Arrays

A fast full-wave simulation technique is presented for the analysis of large irregular planar arrays of identical 3-D metallic antennas. The solution method relies on the Macro Basis Functions (MBF) approach and an interpolatory technique to compute the interactions between MBFs. The Harmonic-polynomial (HARP) model is established for the near-field interactions in a modified system of coordinates. For extremely large arrays made of complex antennas, two approaches assuming a limited radius of influence for mutual coupling are considered: one is based on a sparse-matrix LU decomposition and the other one on a tessellation of the array in the form of overlapping sub-arrays. The computation of all embedded element patterns is sped up with the help of the non-uniform FFT algorithm. Extensive validations are shown for arrays of log-periodic antennas envisaged for the low-frequency SKA (Square Kilometer Array) radio-telescope. The analysis of SKA stations with such a large number of elements has not been treated yet in the literature. Validations include comparison with results obtained with commercial software and with experiments. The proposed method is particularly well suited to array synthesis, in which several orders of magnitude can be saved in terms of computation time.

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