分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder array is a radio interferometer array consisting of 16 six meter dish antennas. The original digital backend integration time is at the seconds level, designed for HI intensity mapping experiment. A new digital backend with millisecond response is added to enable it to search for fast radio burst (FRB) during its observations. The design and calibration of this backend, and the real time search pipeline for it are described in this paper. It is capable of forming 16 digital beams for each linear polarisation, covering an area of 19.6 square degrees. The search pipeline is capable of searching for, recording and classifying FRBs automatically in real time. In commissioning, we succeeded in capturing the signal pulses from the pulsars PSR B0329+54 and B2021+51.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder array is a radio interferometer array consisting of 16 six meter dish antennas. The original digital backend integration time is at the seconds level, designed for HI intensity mapping experiment. A new digital backend with millisecond response is added to enable it to search for fast radio burst (FRB) during its observations. The design and calibration of this backend, and the real time search pipeline for it are described in this paper. It is capable of forming 16 digital beams for each linear polarisation, covering an area of 19.6 square degrees. The search pipeline is capable of searching for, recording and classifying FRBs automatically in real time. In commissioning, we succeeded in capturing the signal pulses from the pulsars PSR B0329+54 and B2021+51.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array is a radio interferometer designed to test techniques for 21~cm intensity mapping in the post-reionization universe as a means for measuring large-scale cosmic structure. It performs drift scans of the sky at constant declination. We describe the design, calibration, noise level, and stability of this instrument based on the analysis of about $\sim 5 \%$ of 6,200 hours of on-sky observations through October, 2019. Beam pattern determinations using drones and the transit of bright sources are in good agreement, and compatible with electromagnetic simulations. Combining all the baselines, we make maps around bright sources and show that the array behaves as expected. A few hundred hours of observations at different declinations have been used to study the array geometry and pointing imperfections, as well as the instrument noise behaviour. We show that the system temperature is below 80~K for most feed antennas, and that noise fluctuations decrease as expected with integration time, at least up to a few hundred seconds. Analysis of long integrations, from 10 nights of observations of the North Celestial Pole, yielded visibilities with amplitudes of 20-30~mK, consistent with the expected signal from the NCP radio sky with $<10\,$mK precision for $1 ~\mathrm{MHz} \times 1~ \mathrm{min}$ binning. Hi-pass filtering the spectra to remove smooth spectrum signal yields a residual consistent with zero signal at the $0.5\,$mK level.