The BINGO Project IV: Simulations for mission performance assessment and preliminary component separation steps

TL;DR

This paper presents simulations of the BINGO radio telescope's performance for 21 cm intensity mapping, optimizing the design and demonstrating the feasibility of component separation methods to extract cosmological signals.

Contribution

It introduces end-to-end simulations for BINGO, optimizing the focal plane design and evaluating the GNILC component separation method's effectiveness.

Findings

Optimized the BINGO telescope's focal plane design.

Demonstrated GNILC's feasibility for signal extraction.

Results comparable to principal component analysis.

Abstract

The large-scale distribution of neutral hydrogen (HI) in the Universe is luminous through its 21 cm emission. The goal of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations -- BINGO -- radio telescope is to detect baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) at radio frequencies through 21 cm intensity mapping (IM). The telescope will span the redshift range 0.127 $< z <$ 0.449 with an instantaneous field-of-view of $14.75^{\circ} \times 6.0^{\circ}$. In this work we investigate different constructive and operational scenarios of the instrument by generating sky maps as they would be produced by the instrument. In doing this we use a set of end-to-end IM mission simulations. The maps will additionally be used to evaluate the efficiency of a component separation method (GNILC). We have simulated the kind of data that would be produced in a single-dish IM experiment such as BINGO. According to the results obtained, we have optimized the focal plane design of the telescope. In addition, the application of the GNILC method on simulated data shows that it is feasible to extract the cosmological signal across a wide range of multipoles and redshifts. The results are comparable with the standard principal component analysis method.