The EoR Sensitivity of the Murchison Widefield Array
A. P. Beardsley, B. J. Hazelton, M. F. Morales, W. Arcus, D. Barnes,, G. Bernardi, J. D. Bowman, F. H. Briggs, J. D. Bunton, R. J. Cappallo, B. E., Corey, A. Deshpande, L. deSouza, D. Emrich, B. M. Gaensler, R. Goeke, L. J., Greenhill, D. Herne, J. N. Hewitt, M. Johnston-Hollitt
TL;DR
This paper evaluates the Murchison Widefield Array's sensitivity to detecting the Epoch of Reionization's 21 cm signal, providing detailed calculations and tools for various models, predicting a significant detection capability.
Contribution
It presents a comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the MWA for EoR detection, including effects like rotation and foreground contamination, and offers tools for broader model assessments.
Findings
MWA can achieve a 14σ detection of EoR with one season of observation.
Sensitivity calculations incorporate realistic instrumental and foreground effects.
Tools are provided to evaluate sensitivity for different EoR models.
Abstract
Using the final 128 antenna locations of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), we calculate its sensitivity to the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) power spectrum of red- shifted 21 cm emission for a fiducial model and provide the tools to calculate the sensitivity for any model. Our calculation takes into account synthesis rotation, chro- matic and asymmetrical baseline effects, and excludes modes that will be contaminated by foreground subtraction. For the fiducial model, the MWA will be capable of a 14{\sigma} detection of the EoR signal with one full season of observation on two fields (900 and 700 hours).
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.