Ionospheric Attenuation of Polarized Foregrounds in 21 cm Epoch of Reionization Measurements: A Demonstration for the HERA Experiment

TL;DR

This paper explores how ionospheric Faraday rotation can help mitigate and test for polarized foreground contamination in 21 cm Epoch of Reionization measurements, especially for HERA, by attenuating polarization leakage in the power spectrum.

Contribution

It demonstrates through simulations that ionospheric Faraday rotation can significantly reduce polarization leakage and serve as a systematic test for foreground contamination in EoR experiments.

Findings

Ionospheric Faraday rotation can attenuate polarization leakage by a factor of 10 or more.

The effect allows for systematic testing of polarized foreground contamination.

Simulations based on real ionospheric data support the mitigation potential.

Abstract

Foregrounds with polarization states that are not smooth functions of frequency present a challenge to HI Epoch of Reionization (EoR) power spectrum measurements if they are not cleanly separated from the desired Stokes I signal. The intrinsic polarization impurity of an antenna's electromagnetic response limits the degree to which components of the polarization state on the sky can be separated from one another, leading to the possibility that this frequency structure could be confused for HI emission. We investigate the potential of Faraday rotation by the Earth's ionosphere to provide a mechanism for both mitigation of, and systematic tests for, this contamination. Specifically, we consider the delay power spectrum estimator, which relies on the expectation that foregrounds will be separated from the cosmological signal by a clearly demarcated boundary in Fourier space, and is being used by the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) experiment. Through simulations of visibility measurements which include the ionospheric Faraday rotation calculated from real historical ionospheric plasma density data, we find that the incoherent averaging of the polarization state over repeated observations of the sky may attenuate polarization leakage in the power spectrum by a factor of 10 or more. Additionally, this effect provides a way to test for the presence of polarized foreground contamination in the EoR power spectrum estimate.