Simulated Effects of 1/f Noise on an SKA Intensity Mapping Survey

TL;DR

This paper models how 1/f noise in SKA-like surveys can significantly increase uncertainties in measuring large-scale HI intensity mapping signals, highlighting challenges for future cosmological observations.

Contribution

It provides a numerical simulation of the impact of 1/f noise on SKA-like HI intensity mapping surveys, quantifying its effect on measurement uncertainties.

Findings

1/f noise can double the effective uncertainty in large-scale measurements

Residual Galactic emission and RFI also pose significant challenges

Simulations help in understanding noise impacts on future surveys

Abstract

It has been proposed recently that the SKA1-MID could be used to conduct an HI intensity mapping survey that could rival upcoming Stage IV dark energy surveys. However, measuring the weak HI signal is expected to be very challenging due to contaminations such as residual Galactic emission, RFI, and instrumental 1/f noise. Modelling the effects of these contaminants on the cosmological HI signal requires numerical end-to-end simulations. Here we present how 1/f noise within the receiver can double the effective uncertainty of an SKA-like survey to HI on large angular scales (l < 50).