A method to improve the sensitivity of radio telescopes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method inspired by Hanbury-Brown and Twiss to reduce phase noise in white chaotic light, enabling more precise flux measurements and potentially increasing radio telescope sensitivity by tenfold at certain frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a technique to eliminate phase noise in radio astronomy signals, improving sensitivity by measuring Poisson fluctuations instead of phase noise.

Findings

Potential to increase radio telescope sensitivity by an order of magnitude.

Effective at frequencies of 1-10 GHz where phase noise dominates.

Method achieves better flux reconstruction through timing resolution improvements.

Abstract

As an extension of the ideas of Hanbury-Brown and Twiss, a method is proposed to eliminate the phase noise of white chaotic light in the regime where it is dominant, and to measure the much smaller Poisson fluctuations from which the incoming flux can be reconstructed (via the equality between variance and mean). The best effect is achieved when the timing resolution is finer than the inverse bandwidth of the spectral filter. There may be applications to radio astronomy at the phase noise dominated frequencies of $1 - 10$GHz, in terms of potentially increasing the sensitivity of telescopes by an order of magnitude.