Ionospheric contributions to the excess power in high-redshift 21-cm power-spectrum observations with LOFAR

Abstract

The turbulent ionosphere causes phase shifts to incoming radio waves on a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. When an interferometer is not sufficiently calibrated for the direction-dependent ionospheric effects, the time-varying phase shifts can cause the signal to decorrelate. The ionosphere's influence over various spatiotemporal scales introduces a baseline-dependent effect on the interferometric array. We study the impact of baseline-dependent decorrelation on high-redshift observations with the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). Datasets with a range of ionospheric corruptions are simulated using a thin-screen ionosphere model, and calibrated using the state-of-the-art LOFAR Epoch of Reionisation pipeline. For the first time ever, we show the ionospheric impact on various stages of the calibration process including an analysis of the transfer of gain errors from longer to shorter baselines using realistic end-to-end simulations. We find that direction-dependent calibration for source subtraction leaves excess power of up to two orders of magnitude above the thermal noise at the largest spectral scales in the cylindrically averaged auto-power spectrum under normal ionospheric conditions. However, we demonstrate that this excess power can be removed through Gaussian process regression, leaving no excess power above the ten per cent level for a $5$km diffractive scale. We conclude that ionospheric errors, in the absence of interactions with other aggravating effects, do not constitute a dominant component in the excess power observed in LOFAR Epoch of Reionisation observations of the North Celestial Pole. Future work should therefore focus on less spectrally smooth effects, such as beam modelling errors.

22 pages, 20 figures. Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)

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• Deeper multi-redshift upper limits on the Epoch of Reionization 21-cm signal power spectrum from LOFAR between z=8.3 and z=10.1
• Improved upper limits on the 21-cm signal power spectrum at $z=17.0$ and $z=20.3$ from an optimal field observed with NenuFAR
• Near-field imaging of local interference in radio interferometric data: Impact on the redshifted 21 cm power spectrum
• Spectral modelling of Cygnus A between 110 and 250 MHz. Impact on the LOFAR 21-cm signal power spectrum
• First upper limits on the 21-cm signal power spectrum of neutral hydrogen at $z=9.16$ from the LOFAR 3C196 field
• Robust direction-dependent gain-calibration of beam-modelling errors far from the target field
• The impact of lossy data compression on the power spectrum of the high redshift 21-cm signal with LOFAR
• Ionospheric effect on the synthetic Epoch of Reionization observations with the SKA1-Low
• Mitigating incoherent excess variance in high-redshift 21 cm observations with multi-output cross-Gaussian process regression