Calibration artefacts in radio interferometry. III. Phase-only calibration and primary beam correction

Abstract

This is the third installment in a series of papers in which we investigate calibration artefacts. Calibration artefacts (also known as ghosts or spurious sources) are created when we calibrate with an incomplete model. In the first two papers of this series we developed a mathematical framework which enabled us to study the ghosting mechanism itself. An interesting concomitant of the second paper was that ghosts appear in symmetrical pairs. This could possibly account for spurious symmetrization. Spurious symmetrization refers to the appearance of a spurious source (the anti-ghost) symmetrically opposite an unmodelled source around a modelled source. The analysis in the first two papers indicates that the anti-ghost is usually very faint, in particular when a large number of antennas are used. This suggests that spurious symmetrization will mainly occur at an almost undetectable flux level. In this paper, we show that phase-only calibration produces an anti-ghost that is $N$-times (where $N$ denotes the number of antennas in the array) as bright as the one produced by phase and amplitude calibration and that this already bright ghost can be further amplified by the primary beam correction.

arXiv comment19 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Corrected typo in arxiv author metadata, no changes to the article

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