Calibration of Quasi-Redundant Interferometers

Understand

High precison calibration is essential for a new generation of radio interferometers looking for Epoch of Reionization and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation signatures in neutral hydrogen.

• These arrays have so far been calibrated by redundant calibration, which usually assumes baselines intended to be identical are perfectly so.
• We present a new calibration scheme that relaxes the assumption of explicit redundancy by calculating the expected covariance of baselines.
• The technique also allows one to take advantage of partial knowledge of the sky, such as point sources with known positions but unknown fluxes.