Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 79, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.79.083530
Keywords
-
Funding
- NASA [NAG5-11099, NNG 05G40G]
- NSF [AST-0134999, AST-05-06556]
- John Templeton foundation
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Research Corporation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We propose an all-digital telescope for 21 cm tomography, which combines key advantages of both single dishes and interferometers. The electric field is digitized by antennas on a rectangular grid, after which a series of fast Fourier transforms recovers simultaneous multifrequency images of up to half the sky. Thanks to Moore's law, the bandwidth up to which this is feasible has now reached about 1 GHz, and will likely continue doubling every couple of years. The main advantages over a single dish telescope are cost and orders of magnitude larger field-of-view, translating into dramatically better sensitivity for large-area surveys. The key advantages over traditional interferometers are cost (the correlator computational cost for an N-element array scales as Nlog(2)N rather than N-2) and a compact synthesized beam. We argue that 21 cm tomography could be an ideal first application of a very large fast Fourier transform telescope, which would provide both massive sensitivity improvements per dollar and mitigate the off-beam point source foreground problem with its clean beam. Another potentially interesting application is cosmic microwave background polarization.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available