What does an interferometer really measure? Including instrument and data characteristics in the reconstruction of the 21cm power spectrum

Abstract

Combining the visibilities measured by an interferometer to form a cosmological power spectrum is a complicated process in which the window functions play a crucial role. In a delay-based analysis, the mapping between instrumental space, made of per-baseline delay spectra, and cosmological space is not a one-to-one relation. Instead, neighbouring modes contribute to the power measured at one point, with their respective contributions encoded in the window functions. To better understand the power spectrum measured by an interferometer, we assess the impact of instrument characteristics and analysis choices on the estimator by deriving its exact window functions, outside of the delay approximation. Focusing on HERA as a case study, we find that observations made with long baselines tend to correspond to enhanced low-k tails of the window functions, which facilitate foreground leakage outside the wedge, whilst the choice of bandwidth and frequency taper can help narrow them down. With the help of simple test cases and more realistic visibility simulations, we show that, apart from tracing mode mixing, the window functions can accurately reconstruct the power spectrum estimator of simulated visibilities. We note that the window functions depend strongly on the chromaticity of the beam, and less on its spatial structure - a Gaussian approximation, ignoring side lobes, is sufficient. Finally, we investigate the potential of asymmetric window functions, down-weighting the contribution of low-k power to avoid foreground leakage. The window functions presented in this work correspond to the latest HERA upper limits for the full Phase I data. They allow an accurate reconstruction of the power spectrum measured by the instrument and can be used in future analyses to confront theoretical models and data directly in cylindrical space.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Comments welcome