Improvement in the accuracy of flux measurement of radio sources by exploiting an arithmetic pattern in photon bunching noise

TL;DR

This paper introduces a software-based hierarchical statistical method to reduce photon bunching noise in incoherent light, significantly improving flux measurement accuracy without new hardware, especially for radio source observations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hierarchy of statistics exploiting arithmetic structures in photon bunching noise to enhance flux measurement precision at the software level.

Findings

Reduces photon bunching noise coherence length

Improves flux measurement accuracy for radio sources

Performance scales with photon number and detector timing resolution

Abstract

A hierarchy of statistics of increasing sophistication and accuracy is proposed, to exploit an interesting and fundamental arithmetic structure in the photon bunching noise of incoherent light of large photon occupation number, with the purpose of suppressing the noise and rendering a more reliable and unbiased measurement of the light intensity. The method does not require any new hardware, rather it operates at the software level, with the help of high precision computers, to reprocess the intensity time series of the incident light to create a new series with smaller bunching noise coherence length. The ultimate accuracy improvement of this method of flux measurement is limited by the timing resolution of the detector and the photon occupation number of the beam (the higher the photon number the better the performance). The principal application is accuracy improvement in the bolometric flux measurement of a radio source.