Wide-field wide-band interferometric imaging:The WB A-Projection and hybrid algorithms

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Wide-Band A-Projection algorithm that corrects for time, frequency, and polarization variations of antenna primary beams in wide-field interferometric imaging, enhancing image accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Wide-Band A-Projection algorithm that incorporates wide bandwidth effects directly into the A-term, improving correction of primary beam variations.

Findings

The WB A-Projection effectively corrects for time, frequency, and polarization dependencies.

Combining WB A-Projection with MT-MFS enables simultaneous sky and spectral index mapping.

Hybrid schemes using narrow-band A-Projection improve wide-field imaging accuracy.

Abstract

Variations of the antenna primary beam (PB) pattern as a function of time, frequency and polarization form one of the dominant direction-dependent effects at most radio frequency bands. These gains may also vary from antenna to antenna. The A-Projection algorithm, published earlier, accounts for the effects of the narrow-band antenna PB in full polarization. In this paper we present the Wide-Band A-Projection algorithm (WB A-Projection) to include the effects of wide bandwidth in the A-term itself and show that the resulting algorithm simultaneously corrects for the time, frequency and polarization dependence of the PB. We discuss the combination of the WB A-Projection and the Multi-term Multi Frequency Synthesis (MT-MFS) algorithm for simultaneous mapping of the sky brightness distribution and the spectral index distribution across a wide field of view. We also discuss the use of the narrow-band A-Projection algorithm in hybrid imaging schemes that account for the frequency dependence of the PB in the image domain.