MEM imaging of multi-wavelength VLBA polarisation observations of Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper introduces a C++ implementation of the Maximum Entropy Method for deconvolving VLBI polarisation data, demonstrating its improved resolution over traditional CLEAN methods through applications to AGN observations.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel C++ MEM implementation for VLBI polarisation data deconvolution and compares its performance with the CLEAN algorithm.

Findings

MEM provides enhanced resolution compared to CLEAN.

MEM successfully produces detailed Faraday rotation and polarisation maps.

The implementation is suitable for multi-wavelength VLBI polarisation data.

Abstract

We have developed a C++ implementation of the Maximum Entropy Method (MEM) suitable for deconvolving VLBI polarisation data. The first results of this implementation are presented and compared with CLEAN-based deconvolutions of the same data. We present Faraday rotation measure and intrinsic polarisation maps of AGN which have been made from MEM deconvolutions of multi-wavelength observations of Stokes parameters I, Q and U. The advantages of using MEM are demonstrated, in particular its enhanced resolution over the CLEAN algorithm.