Precision Calibration of Radio Interferometers for 21 cm Cosmology with No Redundancy and Little Knowledge of Antenna Beams and the Radio Sky

TL;DR

CALAMITY is a novel calibration method for radio interferometers that achieves high-precision bandpass calibration for 21 cm cosmology without relying on redundancy or detailed prior knowledge of antenna beams and foregrounds.

Contribution

It introduces a GPU-accelerated, flexible calibration technique that models foregrounds independently per baseline and enforces spectral smoothness, enabling precise calibration with minimal prior information.

Findings

Successfully removes pathological gain structures in simulations

Achieves calibration precision necessary for 21 cm cosmology measurements

Operates efficiently on interferometers with over 10 antennas

Abstract

We introduce CALAMITY, a precision bandpass calibration method for radio interferometry. CALAMITY can solve for direction independent gains with arbitrary frequency structure to the high precision required for 21 cm cosmology with minimal knowledge of foregrounds or antenna beams and does not require any degree of redundancy (repeated identical measurements of the same baseline). We have achieved this through two key innovations. Firstly, we model the foregrounds on each baseline independently using a flexible and highly efficient set of basis functions that have minimal overlap with 21 cm modes and enforce spectral smoothness in the calibrated foregrounds. Secondly, we use an off-the-shelf GPU accelerated API (TENSORFLOW) to solve for per-baseline foregrounds simultaneously with per-frequency antenna gains in a single optimization loop. GPU acceleration is critical for our technique to be able to solve for the large numbers of foreground and gain parameters simultaneously across all frequencies for an interferometer with $\gtrsim 10$ antennas in a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, we give an overview of our technique and using realistic simulations and demonstrate its performance in solving for and removing pathological gain structures to the level necessary to measure fluctuations in the 21 cm emission field from Hydrogen gas during the Cosmic Dawn and Reionization. If you want to start using CALAMITY now, you can find a tutorial notebook at https://github.com/aewallwi/calamity/blob/main/examples/Calamity_Tutorial.ipynb .