Brighter-fatter effect in near-infrared detectors -- II. Auto-correlation analysis of H4RG-10 flats

Abstract

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will investigate the origins of cosmic acceleration using weak gravitational lensing at near infrared wavelengths. Lensing analyses place strict constraints on the precision of size and ellipticity measurements of the point spread function. WFIRST will use infrared detector arrays, which must be fully characterized to inform data reduction and calibration procedures such that unbiased cosmological results can be achieved. Hirata & Choi 2019 introduces formalism to connect the cross-correlation signal of different flat field time samples to non-linear detector behaviors such as the brighter fatter effect (BFE) and non-linear inter-pixel capacitance (NL-IPC), and this paper applies that framework to a WFIRST development detector, SCA 18237. We find a residual correlation signal after accounting for classical non-linearity. This residual correlation contains a combination of the BFE and NL-IPC; however, further tests suggest that the BFE is the dominant mechanism. If interpreted as a pure BFE, it suggests that the effective area of a pixel is increased by $(2.87\pm 0.03)\times 10^{-7}$ (stat.) for every electron in the 4 nearest neighbors, with a rapid $\sim r^{-5.6\pm 0.2}$ fall-off of the effect for more distant neighbors. We show that the IPC inferred from hot pixels contains the same large-scale spatial variations as the IPC inferred from auto-correlations, albeit with an overall offset of $\sim 0.06\%$. The NL-IPC inferred from hot pixels is too small to explain the cross-correlation measurement, further supporting the BFE hypothesis. This work presents the first evidence for the BFE in an H4RG-10 detector, demonstrates some of the useful insights that can be gleaned from flat field statistics, and represents a significant step towards calibration of WFIRST data.

arXiv comment28 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, version accepted by PASP

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• A Joint Roman Space Telescope and Rubin Observatory Synthetic Wide-Field Imaging Survey
• Weak Gravitational Lensing Shear Estimation with Metacalibration for the Roman High-Latitude Imaging Survey
• Brighter-fatter effect in near-infrared detectors -- III. Fourier-domain treatment of flat field correlations and application to WFIRST
• Quantum yield and charge diffusion in the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope infrared detectors
• Going Forward with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Transient Survey: Validation of Precision Forward-Modeling Photometry for Undersampled Imaging
• An Algorithm to Mitigate Charge Migration Effects in Data from the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph on the James Webb Space Telescope
• Kinematic Lensing Inference I: Characterizing Shape Noise with Simulated Analyses
• Spot-Based Measurement of the Brighter-Fatter Effect on a Roman Space Telescope H4RG Detector and Comparison with Flat-Field Data
• Pixel centroid characterization with laser speckle and application to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope detector arrays
• Quantifying Roman WFI Dark Images with the Wavelet Scattering Transform