FIRST SEASON MWA EOR POWER SPECTRUM RESULTS at REDSHIFT 7

A. P. Beardsley, B. J. Hazelton, I. S. Sullivan, P. Carroll, N. Barry, M. Rahimi, B. Pindor, C. M. Trott, J. Line, Daniel C. Jacobs, M. F. Morales, J. C. Pober, G. Bernardi, Judd D. Bowman, M. P. Busch, F. Briggs, R. J. Cappallo, B. E. Corey, A. De Oliveira-Costa, Joshua S. DillonD. Emrich, A. Ewall-Wice, L. Feng, B. M. Gaensler, R. Goeke, L. J. Greenhill, J. N. Hewitt, N. Hurley-Walker, M. Johnston-Hollitt, D. L. Kaplan, J. C. Kasper, H. S. Kim, E. Kratzenberg, E. Lenc, A. Loeb, C. J. Lonsdale, M. J. Lynch, B. McKinley, S. R. McWhirter, D. A. Mitchell, E. Morgan, A. R. Neben, Nithyanandan Thyagarajan, D. Oberoi, A. R. Offringa, S. M. Ord, S. Paul, T. Prabu, P. Procopio, J. Riding, A. E.E. Rogers, A. Roshi, N. Udaya Shankar, Shiv K. Sethi, K. S. Srivani, R. Subrahmanyan, M. Tegmark, S. J. Tingay, M. Waterson, R. B. Wayth, R. L. Webster, A. R. Whitney, A. Williams, C. L. Williams, C. Wu, J. S.B. Wyithe

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    166 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) has collected hundreds of hours of Epoch of Reionization (EoR) data andnow faces the challenge of overcoming foreground and systematic contamination to reduce the data to acosmological measurement. We introduce several novel analysis techniques, such as cable reflection calibration,hyper-resolution gridding kernels, diffuse foreground model subtraction, and quality control methods. Each changeto the analysis pipeline is tested against a two-dimensional power spectrum figure of merit to demonstrateimprovement. We incorporate the new techniques into a deep integration of 32 hours of MWA data. This data set isused to place a systematic-limited upper limit on the cosmological power spectrum of Δ2 ≤ 2.7×104 mK2 at k =0.27 h Mpc-1 and z = 7.1, consistent with other published limits, and a modest improvement (factor of 1.4) overprevious MWA results. From this deep analysis, we have identified a list of improvements to be made to our EoRdata analysis strategies. These improvements will be implemented in the future and detailed in upcomingpublications.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number102
    JournalAstrophysical Journal
    Volume833
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 10 Dec 2016

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