Removal and replacement of interference in tied-array radio pulsar observations using the spectral kurtosis estimator

TL;DR

This paper presents a spectral kurtosis method for interference removal in radio pulsar observations, optimizing signal-to-noise ratio through different data compensation techniques, and demonstrates its effectiveness on real telescope data.

Contribution

It introduces a spectral kurtosis-based interference removal technique for tied-array radio pulsar data, analyzing optimal data recovery methods and demonstrating practical improvements.

Findings

Spectral kurtosis effectively identifies interference in radio pulsar data.

Scaling non-zapped data improves SNR in coherent summation.

The method reduces timing uncertainty in pulsar observations.

Abstract

We describe how to implement the spectral kurtosis method of interference removal (zapping) on a digitized signal of averaged power values. Spectral kurtosis is a hypothesis test, analogous to the t-test, with a null hypothesis that the amplitudes from which power is formed belong to a `good' distribution -- typically Gaussian with zero mean -- where power values are zapped if the hypothesis is rejected at a specified confidence level. We derive signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) as a function of amount of zapping for folded radio pulsar observations consisting of a sum of signals from multiple telescopes in independent radio-frequency interference (RFI) environments, comparing four methods to compensate for lost data with coherent (tied-array) and incoherent summation. For coherently summed amplitudes, scaling amplitudes from non-zapped telescopes achieves a higher SNR than replacing zapped amplitudes with artificial noise. For incoherently summed power values, the highest SNR is given by scaling power from non-zapped telescopes to maintain a constant mean. We use spectral kurtosis to clean a tied-array radio pulsar observation by the Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP): the signal from one telescope is zapped with time and frequency resolutions of 6.25 $\mu$s and 0.16 MHz, removing interference along with 0.27 per cent of `good' data, giving an uncertainty of 0.25 $\mu$s in pulse time of arrival (TOA) for PSR J1022+1001. We use a single-telescope observation to demonstrate recovery of the pulse profile shape, with 0.6 per cent of data zapped and a reduction from 1.22 to 0.70 $\mu$s in TOA uncertainty.