Lowering in-memory footprint of antenna beams via polynomial approximation

Internet publication

With the emergence of new radio telescopes promising larger fields of view at lower observation frequencies (e.g., SKA), addressing direction-dependent effects (DDE) (e.g., direction-specific beam responses), polarisation leakage, and pointing errors has become all the more important. Be it through A-projection or otherwise, addressing said effects often requires reliable representations of antenna/station beams; yet, these require significant amounts of computational memory as they are baseline-, frequency-, time-, and polarisation-dependent. A novel prototype is reported here to approximate antenna beams suitable for SKA-MID using Zernike polynomials. It is shown that beam kernels can be well approximated, paving the way for future optimisations towards facilitating more efficient beam-dependent solutions and approaches to tackling the aforementioned challenges, all of which are essential for large-scale radio telescopes.

Authors: Taqi, A; Adámek, K; Gueuning, Q; Serylak, M; Laing, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Not peer reviewed
• Host title: arXiv
• Publication date: 2024-12-30
• DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2412.21010
• Language: English
• Keywords: astro-ph.IM