An Introduction to Single-Antenna Radio Astronomical Polarimetry

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: van Straten, Willem
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author van Straten, Willem
author_facet van Straten, Willem
contents This tutorial reviews the mathematical foundations of single-antenna radio polarimetry with the aim of fostering a conceptual understanding of the relationships between a physical description of signal propagation (gain, delay, reflection, down-conversion, etc.), the corresponding transformations of the electric field vector, and the equivalent operations on the Stokes parameters. The adopted framework is based on the work of Britton (2000) and Hamaker (2000) and applied to analyze the signal path described by Hamaker et al. (1996) with additional corrections for phase convention and reflection. Some objective criteria for selecting a model of the instrumental response are introduced and discussed, along with some practical guidelines that facilitate polarimetric calibration. Further relevant background material and lengthier mathematical proofs are included in the appendix, which introduces the vector, matrix, and tensor notation and concepts of linear algebra used in this work. The appendix also reviews some of the basics of analog and digital signal processing that are relevant to radio astronomy, and discusses some numerical instabilities that arise when modeling observations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_07818
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Introduction to Single-Antenna Radio Astronomical Polarimetry
van Straten, Willem
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
This tutorial reviews the mathematical foundations of single-antenna radio polarimetry with the aim of fostering a conceptual understanding of the relationships between a physical description of signal propagation (gain, delay, reflection, down-conversion, etc.), the corresponding transformations of the electric field vector, and the equivalent operations on the Stokes parameters. The adopted framework is based on the work of Britton (2000) and Hamaker (2000) and applied to analyze the signal path described by Hamaker et al. (1996) with additional corrections for phase convention and reflection. Some objective criteria for selecting a model of the instrumental response are introduced and discussed, along with some practical guidelines that facilitate polarimetric calibration. Further relevant background material and lengthier mathematical proofs are included in the appendix, which introduces the vector, matrix, and tensor notation and concepts of linear algebra used in this work. The appendix also reviews some of the basics of analog and digital signal processing that are relevant to radio astronomy, and discusses some numerical instabilities that arise when modeling observations.
title An Introduction to Single-Antenna Radio Astronomical Polarimetry
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07818