Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Polarization Calibration of the FAST L-band 19-beam Receiver: I. On-axis Mueller Matrix Parameters |
| Authors: |
Ching, Tao-Chung, Heiles, Carl, Li, Di, Robishaw, Timothy, Chen, Xunzhou, Meng, Lingqi, Yue, You-Ling, Qian, Lei, Liu, Hong-Fei |
| Publication Year: |
2024 |
| Collection: |
Astrophysics |
| Subject Terms: |
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| More Details: |
We present the polarization calibration of the 19-beam receiver at 1420 MHz within the full illumination of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope from October 2018 to March 2023. We perform spider observations to characterize the on-axis Mueller matrix of the central beam. The calibrated polarization percentage and polarization angle of a source with strong linear polarization emission are about 0.2\% and 0.5$^{\circ}$. Several parameters of the central-beam Mueller matrix show time variability from months to years, suggesting relatively frequent polarization calibrations are needed. We obtain the Mueller matrix parameters of the 18 off-center beams with the combination of on-the-fly observations and spider observations. The polarization calibration provides consistent fractional Stokes parameters of the 19 beams, although the Mueller matrix parameters of the off-center beams are not as accurate as those of the central beam. The Mueller matrix parameters of the central beam do not show a strong dependence on the reflector surface. However, we notice different off-center Mueller matrix parameters between the eastern and western sides of the reflector surface. We provide average parameters of the 19-beam Mueller matrices which should be applicable to observations from 2020 to 2022 with several caveats. After applying the average parameters, on-axis fractional linear polarization measurements $\gtrsim$ 10\% and on-axis fractional circular polarization measurements $\gtrsim$ 1.5\% can be considered high-confidence detections. For sources with weak polarization, timely polarization calibrations using spider observations are required.
Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures, , Submitted to AJ |
| Document Type: |
Working Paper |
| Access URL: |
http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18763 |
| Accession Number: |
edsarx.2411.18763 |
| Database: |
arXiv |
