A Visibility-based 21 cm Bispectrum Estimator for Radio-interferometric Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, scalable estimator for the 21 cm bispectrum from radio interferometric data, validated with simulations, enabling better analysis of the epoch of reionization.

Contribution

It presents a novel FFT-based method to efficiently compute the 3D bispectrum covering all triangle configurations in radio interferometric observations.

Findings

Estimator accurately recovers the bispectrum from simulated data.

Deviations are below 20%, consistent with statistical fluctuations.

Method works well with flagged and unflagged data.

Abstract

We present a fast and scalable estimator for the binned multi-frequency angular bispectrum (MABS) and the 3D bispectrum (BS) of the redshifted 21 cm signal from radio interferometric observations. The estimator operates on gridded visibilities and leverages the FFT-based acceleration to efficiently compute the MABS and the 3D BS covering all possible triangle configurations. We present the formalism and validate the estimator using simulated visibility data for a known input model BS, considering the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) observations with a bandwidth of $30.72$ MHz centered at $154.25$ MHz. We consider two cases, namely, without flagging, and with flagging, which has exactly the same frequency channels flagged as the actual data. We obtain estimates of the BS for a wide range of triangle shapes covering the scales $0.003 ~\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}\leq k_1 \leq 1.258 ~\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$. The estimated BS shows excellent agreement with analytical predictions based on the input model BS. We find that the deviations, which are below 20\% even in the presence of flagging, are mostly consistent with the expected statistical fluctuations. This work paves the way for reliable observational estimates of the 21 cm BS for the epoch of reionization, where the signal is predicted to be highly non-Gaussian.