Classifying Complex Faraday Spectra with Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Advances in radio spectro-polarimetry offer the possibility to disentangle complex regions where relativistic and thermal plasmas mix in the interstellar and intergalactic media. Recent work has shown that apparently simple Faraday Rotation Measure (RM) spectra can be generated by complex sources. This is true even when the distribution of RMs in the complex source greatly exceeds the errors associated with a single component fit to the peak of the Faraday spectrum. We present a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can differentiate between simple Faraday thin spectra and those that contain multiple or Faraday thick sources. We demonstrate that this CNN, trained for the upcoming Polarisation Sky Survey of the Universe's Magnetism (POSSUM) early science observations, can identify two component sources 99% of the time, provided that the sources are separated in Faraday depth by $>$10% of the FWHM of the Faraday Point Spread Function, the polarized flux ratio of the sources is $>$0.1, and that the Signal-to-Noise radio (S/N) of the primary component is $>$5. With this S/N cut-off, the false positive rate (simple sources mis-classified as complex) is $<$0.3%. Work is ongoing to include Faraday thick sources in the training and testing of the CNN.

arXiv comment7 pages, 7 figures, submitted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• RMTable2023 and PolSpectra2023: standards for reporting polarization and Faraday rotation measurements of radio sources
• Revisiting Rotation Measures from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey: the Magnetic Field in the Disk of the Outer Galaxy
• Full Resolution Deconvolution of Complex Faraday Spectra
• MRSNet: Metabolite Quantification from Edited Magnetic Resonance Spectra With Convolutional Neural Networks
• Broad-band Radio Polarimetry of disk galaxies and AGN with KAT 7
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: Giant Radio Galaxy Classification using Multi-Domain Deep Learning
• Searching for outliers in the Chandra Source Catalog