Advanced Multi-beam Spectrometer for the Green Bank Telescope

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new multi-beam spectrometer for the Green Bank Telescope that significantly enhances bandwidth and sub-band capabilities, enabling advanced scientific observations with focal plane arrays.

Contribution

It presents a novel spectrometer design supporting up to 10 GHz bandwidth and multiple tunable sub-bands, improving GBT's observational flexibility.

Findings

Supports up to 1.25 GHz bandwidth from 8 beams

Can process up to 10 GHz bandwidth with 64 sub-bands

Enables new science projects with enhanced backend capabilities

Abstract

A new spectrometer for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is being built jointly by the NRAO and the CASPER, University of California, Berkeley. The spectrometer uses 8 bit ADCs and will be capable of processing up to 1.25 GHz bandwidth from 8 dual polarized beams. This mode will be used to process data from focal plane arrays. The spectrometer supports observing mode with 8 tunable digital sub-bands within the 1.25 GHz bandwidth. The spectrometer can also be configured to process a bandwidth of up to 10 GHz with 64 tunable sub-bands from a dual polarized beam. The vastly enhanced backend capabilities will support several new science projects with the GBT.