Speaker
Description
Understanding the beam shapes of the Murchison Widefield Array(MWA) tiles is particularly important to studies of faint structure such as extragalactic mapping and the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). As teams around the globe improve analysis techniques and their understanding of instrumental effects, the 21cm power spectrum detection of EoR structure is in sight. At this stage, understanding the variations in beam shapes of telescopes such as the MWA, will be crucial. In this study, the beam shapes of 14 MWA tiles are measured, in both polarizations and at multiple pointings, using communication satellites. We aim to understand by how much, and in what way, the MWA beams differ from simulations of ‘ideal’ beam shapes. It is well known that the MWA suffers from polarization leakage, where flux from stokes I leaks into other stokes parameters. This effect is known to be of the order of∼1% at the centre of the beam and∼4% towards the edge of the beam. Our study will reveal the extent of this leakage to a much higher accuracy, which will be beneficial to polarization studies of the ISM and the Ionosphere. We will also demonstrate how other telescopes can implement similar experiments easily, using cheap off-the-shelf equipment.
| Suggested presentation duration (minutes) | 15 |
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