System equivalent flux density of a low-frequency polarimetric phased array interferometer

TL;DR

This paper derives a comprehensive SEFD formula for low-frequency phased array interferometers, accounting for mutual and noise coupling, and demonstrates that common RMS approximations underestimate true system sensitivity.

Contribution

It provides a fundamental SEFD expression applicable to phased array interferometers that includes intra-array coupling effects without restrictive assumptions.

Findings

SEFD_I^rms underestimates true SEFD

The new SEFD formula accounts for intra-array noise coupling

RMS approximation leads to overestimated array sensitivity

Abstract

This paper extends the treatment of system equivalent flux density (SEFD) in Sutinjo, A. T. et al. (2021) (Paper I) to interferometric phased array telescopes. The objective is to develop an SEFD formula involving only the most fundamental assumptions and one that is readily applicable to phased array interferometer radio observations. Then, we aimed at comparing the resultant SEFD expression against the often-used root-mean-square (RMS) SEFD approximation, SEFDrmsI = (1/2)(SEFD^2_XX + SEFD^2_YY)^(1/2) to study the inaccuracy of the SEFDrms. We take into account all mutual coupling and noise coupling within an array environment (intra-array coupling). This intra-array noise coupling is included in the SEFD expression through the realized noise resistance of the array, which accounts for the system noise. No assumption is made regarding the polarization (or lack thereof) of the sky nor the orthogonality of the antenna elements. The fundamental noise assumption is that, in phasor representation, the real and imaginary components of a given noise source are independent and equally distributed (iid) with zero mean. Noise sources that are mutually correlated and non-iid among themselves are allowed, provided the real and imaginary components of each noise source are iid. The system noise is uncorrelated between array entities separated by a baseline distance, which in the case of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is typically tens of wavelengths or greater. By comparing the resulting SEFD formula to the SEFD_I^rms approximation, we proved that SEFD_I^rms always underestimates the SEFD, which leads to an overestimation of array sensitivity.