Serial MultiView: an efficient approach to mitigating atmospheric spatial-structure errors for VLBI astrometry

TL;DR

Serial MultiView is a new VLBI astrometry technique that reduces atmospheric errors more efficiently by rotating phase planes iteratively, enabling high-accuracy measurements with less observing time, especially at higher frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel serial MultiView method that shortens observation cycles and improves atmospheric error mitigation in VLBI astrometry.

Findings

Achieves <10 microarcseconds RA error at 5GHz

Reduces calibration overhead compared to traditional methods

Effective at higher frequencies with shorter cycles

Abstract

Atmospheric propagation errors are a main constraint on the accuracy of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) astrometry. For relative astrometry, differential techniques can mitigate these errors, but their effectiveness diminishes with decreasing elevation and increasing angular separations between target and calibrator, among others. The MultiView technique addresses atmospheric spatial-structure errors by observing multiple calibrators around the target and interpolating at the target position, thereby reducing atmospheric errors more effectively than phase-referencing with only one calibrator. The first MultiView realisation at 1.6GHz involved cyclically observing all calibrators and the target, fitting a phase plane from calibrator solutions in each cycle, and is a well-established technique. This implementation reduces on-target time and is constricted by the short atmospheric coherence time at high frequencies. We propose a new realisation, serial MultiView, which rotates the phase plane iteratively based on the time series of calibrator residual phases. This new strategy obviates the necessity of observing all calibrators within each cycle, thereby shortening the observing cycle and offering considerable potential at higher frequencies where the temporal structure is the dominant source of errors. Additionally, by incorporating time-domain information in the iterations, phase ambiguities can be accurately and automatically identified. We verify the astrometric accuracy of serial MultiView at 5GHz by comparing it to conventional MultiView, achieving <10uas error in RA direction, and show the calibration overhead can be reduced in both approaches. This approach enables efficient, high-accuracy differential astrometry and artifact-reduced imaging for astrophysical studies, and we provide a user-friendly tool for it.