21cm Club: 26 April 2016

Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 11:03:23
From: Steve Torchinsky <steve.torchinsky@obspm.fr>
To: Club 21cm
Subject: 21cm Club summary and next meeting

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for a very interesting discussion on Tuesday!

The next meeting will be hosted by LAL in the first half of June.
Please fill in the doodle:
http://doodle.com/poll/8tihagsqabazvki3

Here are a few notes from Tuesday’s meeting:

21cm Cosmology club meeting
26 April 2016 at APC, Paris, 10.30 to ~14.30 (including lunch).

participants:
Martin Bucher
Ken Ganga
Reza Ansari
Marc Moniez
Steve Torchinsky
Aurore Savoy-Navarro
George Smoot

HIRAX: Martin Bucher and Ken Ganga

HIRAX is The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment.  It is a 21cm intensity mapping instrument to be built on the SKA South Africa site.  It will be composed initially of 128 7m dishes, and will later grow to 1024 dishes.  Redshift range 0.8 to 2.5 (400MHz to 800MHz).

Martin is an honorary professor at Universty of Kwazulu-Natal, and both Ken and Martin have an established collaboration with Jonathan Sievers, the PI of HIRAX.

CHIME: (all)

CHIME is the Canadian HI Intensity Mapping Experment.  No French astronomers are currently members of the collaboration.  CHIME is composed of 4 cylindrical reflectors, each of 20m diameter, and 100m diameter length.  The line focus is populated by a number of dipoles, and CHIME is a transit telescope using beamforming to map the sky. The CHIME pathfinder was operational last year, and the full CHIME should start taking data this year.

GBT: (all)

survey correlated with optical survey (Masui et al, 2013, ApJ, 763, L77), and recent « re-cleaning » by Wolz et al (arXiv:1510.05453)

Intensity Mapping with FAST: George Smoot
arXiv:1407.3583
and by Bigot-Sazy et al arXiv:1511.03006

PAON4 at Nancay and TIANLAI: Reza

PAON4 is a 4 dish array, each of 5m diameter, installed at Nancay. This is a prototype to test the BAOradio electronics which is also a contribution to the TIANLAI dish array in China.  TIANLAI is two separate instruments.  There is an array of cylinders, and a 16 dish array.

papers:

The use of Nançay Radio Telescope and the BAORadio electronics to detect 21 cm signal in nearby clusters (A85 ?) On sky characterization of the BAORadio wide band digital backend
Search for H I emission in Abell85, Abell1205 and Abell2440 galaxy clusters:
Ansari et al, 2016, Experiment Astronomy, 41, 117

Map making for transit interferometers , noise power spectrum, sensitivity to temp. brightness.  The first paper submitted to MNRAS, « Sky reconstruction method from transit visibilities application to the PAON-4 & Tianlai Dish Array »

SKA Mid Frequency Aperture Array: Steve

The dense packed array of antennas is proposed for the second phase of SKA for the frequencies between 450MHz and 1450MHz.  EMBRACE is the prototype in operation at Nancay composed of 4608 Vivaldi antennas. Results and details of the characterization of EMBRACE are published in A&A 2016, 589, A77,

The SKA Phase 2 is currently planned for ~2030.  In the shorter term, a station of around 1000m2 is proposed to be built on the SKA South Africa site, and hopefully will be in operation roughly on the same time scale as SKA Phase 1 (probably around 2022 or so).  The project is called MANTIS.  It’s led by ASTRON, and we are seeking funding.  A first draft proposal has been written, but it’s not clear where to submit a funding proposal.

France is not a member of SKA, and it doesn’t look like we will become members before Phase 2 (not before 5 years from now).

INFIERI: Aurore

INFIERI is the INtelligent, Fast, Interconnected and Efficient devices for Frontier Exploitation in Research and Industry.

INFIERI is a European Commission FP7 ITN network.  Aurore is the coordinator.  INFIERI focuses on training of Early Career Scientists by funding PhD students, post-docs, and organizing two workshops and a summer school each year.  Projects are related to front-end hardware and software development, including fast data processing and algorithm development in the fields of particle physics, astrophysics, and medical physics.  In astrophysics, the Cerenkov Telescope Array and SKA are the primary instruments for INFIERI.

Discussion continued over lunch.

next meeting at LAL in early June: doodle survey

Steve & Martin