A Floating Octave Bandwidth Cone-Disc Antenna for Detection of Cosmic Dawn

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel low-frequency cone-disc antenna designed for detecting the faint, wideband 21-cm signals from Cosmic Dawn, utilizing a water surface to achieve high fidelity and minimal spectral distortion.

Contribution

The paper introduces an innovative electrically small cone-disc antenna operating on a water surface, optimized for cosmic dawn radio detection with achromatic beam pattern and high efficiency.

Findings

Achromatic beam pattern achieved across 40-90 MHz

High radiation efficiency demonstrated in field tests

Minimal spectral distortion confirmed by measurements

Abstract

The critical component of radio astronomy radiometers built to detect redshifted 21-cm signals from Cosmic Dawn is the antenna element. We describe the design and performance of an octave bandwidth cone disc antenna built to detect this signal in the band 40 to 90 MHz. The Cosmic Dawn signal is predicted to be a wideband spectral feature orders of magnitude weaker than sky and ground radio brightness. Thus, the engineering challenge is to design an antenna at low frequencies that is able to provide with high fidelity the faint cosmological signal, along with foreground sky, to the receiver. The antenna characteristics must not compromise detection by imprinting any confusing spectral features on the celestial radiation, ground emission or receiver noise. An innovation in the present design is making the antenna electrically smaller than half wavelength and operating it on the surface of a sufficiently large water body. The homogeneous and high permittivity medium beneath the small cone-disc antenna results in an achromatic beam pattern, high radiation efficiency and minimum unwanted confusing spectral features. The antenna design was optimized in WIPL-D and FEKO. A prototype was constructed and deployed on a lake to validate its performance with field measurements. Index Terms: Antenna measurements, radio astronomy, reflector antennas.