Polarization Calibration of the FAST L-band 19-beam Receiver: I. On-axis Mueller Matrix Parameters

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 calibrat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-11
Main Authors: Tao-Chung, Ching, Heiles, Carl, Li, Di, Robishaw, Timothy, Chen, Xunzhou, Meng, Lingqi, You-Ling, Yue, Qian, Lei, Hong-Fei, Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Calibration
Circular polarization
Linear polarization
Stokes parameters
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422