Simulations of astronomical imaging phased arrays

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of astronomical phased arrays with overlapping beams, demonstrating that overlapping beams improve image quality and that dynamic range impacts array performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theoretical procedure for analyzing overlapping-beam phased arrays and shows that overlapping beams yield better images than traditionally used non-overlapping beams.

Findings

Overlapping beams increase the degrees of freedom of the array.

Overlapping beams enhance the array's ability to recover sources.

Higher dynamic range improves image quality.

Abstract

We describe a theoretical procedure for analyzing astronomical phased arrays with overlapping beams, and apply the procedure to simulate a simple example. We demonstrate the effect of overlapping beams on the number of degrees of freedom of the array, and on the ability of the array to recover a source. We show that the best images are obtained using overlapping beams, contrary to common practise, and show how the dynamic range of a phased array directly affects the image quality.