BAYESIAN SEMI-BLIND COMPONENT SEPARATION FOR FOREGROUND REMOVAL IN INTERFEROMETRIC 21 cm OBSERVATIONS
- Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706 (United States)
- Physics Department, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Brown University, 182 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02912 (United States)
- Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 (United States)
In this paper, we present a new Bayesian semi-blind approach for foreground removal in observations of the 21 cm signal measured by interferometers. The technique, which we call H i Expectation–Maximization Independent Component Analysis (HIEMICA), is an extension of the Independent Component Analysis technique developed for two-dimensional (2D) cosmic microwave background maps to three-dimensional (3D) 21 cm cosmological signals measured by interferometers. This technique provides a fully Bayesian inference of power spectra and maps and separates the foregrounds from the signal based on the diversity of their power spectra. Relying only on the statistical independence of the components, this approach can jointly estimate the 3D power spectrum of the 21 cm signal, as well as the 2D angular power spectrum and the frequency dependence of each foreground component, without any prior assumptions about the foregrounds. This approach has been tested extensively by applying it to mock data from interferometric 21 cm intensity mapping observations under idealized assumptions of instrumental effects. We also discuss the impact when the noise properties are not known completely. As a first step toward solving the 21 cm power spectrum analysis problem, we compare the semi-blind HIEMICA technique to the commonly used Principal Component Analysis. Under the same idealized circumstances, the proposed technique provides significantly improved recovery of the power spectrum. This technique can be applied in a straightforward manner to all 21 cm interferometric observations, including epoch of reionization measurements, and can be extended to single-dish observations as well.
- OSTI ID:
- 22520029
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Vol. 222, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0067-0049
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
CONSTRAINING POLARIZED FOREGROUNDS FOR EoR EXPERIMENTS. I. 2D POWER SPECTRA FROM THE PAPER-32 IMAGING ARRAY
THE IMPORTANCE OF WIDE-FIELD FOREGROUND REMOVAL FOR 21 cm COSMOLOGY: A DEMONSTRATION WITH EARLY MWA EPOCH OF REIONIZATION OBSERVATIONS