Search

Detecting primordial fluctuations from the cosmic dark ages requires extremely large low-frequency radio telescope arrays deployed on the far side of the Moon. The antenna of such an array must be lightweight, easily storable and transportable, deployable on a large scale, durable, and capable of good electrical performance. A membrane antenna is an excellent candidate to meet these criteria. We study the design of a low-frequency membrane antenna for a lunar-based low-frequency (<30 MHz) radio telescope constructed from polyimide film widely used in aerospace applications, owing to its excellent dielectric properties and high stability as a substrate material. We first design and optimize an antenna in free space through dipole deformation and coupling principles, then simulate an antenna on the lunar surface with a simple lunar soil model, yielding an efficiency greater than 90% in the range of 12-19 MHz and greater than 10% in the range of 5-35 MHz. The antenna inherits the omni-directional radiation pattern of a simple dipole antenna in the 5-30 MHz frequency band, giving a large field of view and allowing detection of the 21 cm global signal when used alone. A demonstration prototype is constructed, and its measured electrical property is found to be consistent with simulated results using |S11| measurements. This membrane antenna can potentially fulfill the requirements of a lunar low-frequency array, establishing a solid technical foundation for future large-scale arrays for exploring the cosmic dark ages., Comment: 14 pages, 19 figures

This paper presents the design, calibration, and survey strategy of the Fast Radio Burst (FRB) digital backend and its real-time data processing pipeline employed in the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder array. The array, consisting of three parallel cylindrical reflectors and equipped with 96 dual-polarization feeds, is a radio interferometer array designed for conducting drift scans of the northern celestial semi-sphere. The FRB digital backend enables the formation of 96 digital beams, effectively covering an area of approximately 40 square degrees with 3 dB beam. Our pipeline demonstrates the capability to make automatic search of FRBs, detecting at quasi-real-time and classify FRB candidates automatically. The current FRB searching pipeline has an overall recall rate of 88\%. During the commissioning phase, we successfully detected signals emitted by four well-known pulsars: PSR B0329+54, B2021+51, B0823+26, and B2020+28. We report the first discovery of an FRB by our array, designated as FRB 20220414A. We also investigate the optimal arrangement for the digitally formed beams to achieve maximum detection rate by numerical simulation., Comment: 27 pages, 21 figures, 7 tables, RAA accepted

The redshifted 21 cm line signal is a powerful probe of the cosmic dawn and the epoch of reionization. The global spectrum can potentially be detected with a single antenna and spectrometer. However, this measurement requires an extremely accurate calibration of the instrument to facilitate the separation of the 21 cm signal from the much brighter foregrounds and possible variations in the instrument response. Understanding how the measurement errors propagate in a realistic instrument system and affect system calibration is the focus of this work. We simulate a 21 cm global spectrum observation based on the noise wave calibration scheme. We focus on how measurement errors in reflection coefficients affect the noise temperature and how typical errors impact the recovery of the 21 cm signal, especially in the frequency domain. Results show that for our example set up, a typical vector network analyzer (VNA) measurement error in the magnitude of the reflection coefficients of the antenna, receiver, and open cable, which are 0.001, 0.001, and 0.002 (linear), respectively, would result in a 200 mK deviation on the detected signal, and a typical measurement error of 0.48 degree, 0.78 degree, or 0.15 degree in the respective phases would cause a 40 mK deviation. The VNA measurement error can greatly affect the result of a 21 cm global spectrum experiment using this calibration technique, and such a feature could be mistaken for or be combined with the 21 cm signal, Comment: 29 pages, 20 figures

The HI 21cm global signal from the Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) offers critical insights into the evolution of our Universe. Yet, its detection presents significant challenges due to its extremely low signal-to-contamination ratio and complex instrumental systematics. In this paper, we examine the effects of the ionosphere and antenna beam on data analysis. The ionosphere, an ionized plasma layer in the Earth's atmosphere, refracts, absorbs, and emits radio waves in the relevant frequency range. This interaction results in additional spectral distortion of the observed signal, complicating the process of foreground subtraction. Additionally, chromatic variations in the beam can also introduce further contamination into the global spectrum measurement. Notably, the ionospheric effect, being dependent on the direction of incoming light, interacts with the instrumental beam, adding another layer of complexity. To address this, we evaluate three different fitting templates of foreground: the logarithmic polynomial, the physically motivated EDGES template, and a SVD-based template. Our findings indicate that the EDGES and SVD templates generally surpass logarithmic polynomials in performance. Recognizing the significance of beam chromaticity, we further investigate specific beam distortion models and their impacts on the signal extraction process., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

At the Royal Society meeting in 2023, we have mainly presented our lunar orbit array concept called DSL, and also briefly introduced a concept of a lunar surface array, LARAF. As the DSL concept had been presented before, in this article we introduce the LARAF. We propose to build an array in the far side of the Moon, with a master station which handles the data collection and processing, and 20 stations with maximum baseline of 10 km. Each station consists 12 membrane antenna units, and the stations are connected to the master station by power line and optical fiber. The array will make interferometric observation in the 0.1-50 MHz band during the lunar night, powered by regenerated fuel cells (RFCs). The whole array can be carried to the lunar surface with a heavy rocket mission, and deployed with a rover in 8 months. Such an array would be an important step in the long term development of lunar based ultralong wavelength radio astronomy. It has a sufficiently high sensitivity to observe many radio sources in the sky, though still short of the dark age fluctuations. We discuss the possible options in the power supply, data communication, deployment, etc., Comment: final submission version, 30 pages, 16 figures

Directly learning to model 4D content, including shape, color and motion, is challenging. Existing methods depend on skeleton-based motion control and offer limited continuity in detail. To address this, we propose a novel framework that generates coherent 4D sequences with animation of 3D shapes under given conditions with dynamic evolution of shape and color over time through integrative latent mapping. We first employ an integrative latent unified representation to encode shape and color information of each detailed 3D geometry frame. The proposed skeleton-free latent 4D sequence joint representation allows us to leverage diffusion models in a low-dimensional space to control the generation of 4D sequences. Finally, temporally coherent 4D sequences are generated conforming well to the input images and text prompts. Extensive experiments on the ShapeNet, 3DBiCar and DeformingThings4D datasets for several tasks demonstrate that our method effectively learns to generate quality 3D shapes with color and 4D mesh animations, improving over the current state-of-the-art. Source code will be released.

The visibilities measured by radio astronomical interferometers include non-astronomical correlated signals that arise from the local environment of the array. These correlated signals are especially important in compact arrays such as those under development for 21\,cm intensity mapping. The amplitudes of the contaminated visibilities can exceed the expected 21\,cm signal and represent a significant systematic effect. We study the receiver noise radiated by antennas in compact arrays and develop a model for how it couples to other antennas. We apply the model to the Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array (TDPA), a compact array of 16, 6-m dish antennas. The coupling model includes electromagnetic simulations, measurements with a network analyzer, and measurements of the noise of the receivers. We compare the model to drift-scan observations with the array and set requirements on the level of antenna cross-coupling for 21\,cm intensity mapping instruments. We find that for the TDPA, cross-coupling would have to be reduced by TBD orders of magnitude in order to contribute negligibly to the visibilities., Comment: 20 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication by JAI

The Tianlai cylinder array is a pathfinder for developing and testing 21cm intensity mapping techniques. In this paper, we use numerical simulation to assess how its measurement is affected by thermal noise and the errors in calibration and map-making process, and the error in the sky map reconstructed from a drift scan survey. Here we consider only the single frequency, unpolarized case. The beam is modelled by fitting to the electromagnetic simulation of the antenna, and the variations of the complex gains of the array elements are modelled by Gaussian processes. Mock visibility data is generated and run through our data processing pipeline. We find that the accuracy of the current calibration is limited primarily by the absolute calibration, where the error comes mainly from the approximation of a single dominating point source. We then studied the $m$-mode map-making with the help of Moore-Penrose inverse. We find that discarding modes with singular values smaller than a threshold could generate visible artifacts in the map. The impacts of the residue variation of the complex gain and thermal noise are also investigated. The thermal noise in the map varies with latitude, being minimum at the latitude passing through the zenith of the telescope. The angular power spectrum of the reconstructed map show that the current Tianlai cylinder pathfinder, which has a shorter maximum baseline length in the North-South direction, can measure modes up to $l \lesssim 2\pi b_{\rm NS}/\lambda \sim 200$ very well, but would lose a significant fraction of higher angular modes when noise is present. These results help us to identify the main limiting factors in our current array configuration and data analysis procedure, and suggest that the performance can be improved by reconfiguration of the array feed positions., Comment: 25 pages, 18 figures, RAA accepted

Magnetic particle spectroscopy (MPS) is one of the most versatile methods to characterize the magnetic properties of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). The excitation magnetic field is one of the most crucial factors that affects the MPS signal of the MNPs. In this study, a multi-frequency MPS system is developed to investigate the MPS signal of MNPs in different ac magnetic fields. The MPS system consists of a multi-channel excitation module for the generation of different-frequency ac magnetic fields and a detection module for the measurement of the magnetic response of the MNPs. The MPS system allows to generate ac magnetic fields with a frequency up to 32.6 kHz and amplitude up to 25 mT. The MPS signals of the MNPs in different ac magnetic fields are measured to systematically evaluate the performance of the multi-frequency MPS system, including the MNP spectra and its dynamic magnetization curve. In addition, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the MPS system is quantitively assessed with measured MPS signals of a given MNP sample and DI water. Furthermore, a series of MNP samples with different iron concentrations are prepared and measured to evaluate the limit-of-detection (LOD) in terms of iron concentration. The influence of the excitation magnetic field, including frequency and amplitude, is discussed based on the SNRs of the measured harmonics. Experimental results show that the LOD is 2.3 ng in terms of iron., Comment: 7 pages, 12 figures

Multiple object detection and pose estimation are vital computer vision tasks. The latter relates to the former as a downstream problem in applications such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, due to the high complexity of both tasks, existing methods generally treat them independently, which is sub-optimal. We propose simultaneous neural modeling of both using monocular vision and 3D model infusion. Our Simultaneous Multiple Object detection and Pose Estimation network (SMOPE-Net) is an end-to-end trainable multitasking network with a composite loss that also provides the advantages of anchor-free detections for efficient downstream pose estimation. To enable the annotation of training data for our learning objective, we develop a Twin-Space object labeling method and demonstrate its correctness analytically and empirically. Using the labeling method, we provide the KITTI-6DoF dataset with $\sim7.5$K annotated frames. Extensive experiments on KITTI-6DoF and the popular LineMod datasets show a consistent performance gain with SMOPE-Net over existing pose estimation methods. Here are links to our proposed SMOPE-Net, KITTI-6DoF dataset, and LabelImg3D labeling tool.

The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder array is a radio interferometer array consisting of 16 six meter dish antennas. The original digital backend integration time is at the seconds level, designed for HI intensity mapping experiment. A new digital backend with millisecond response is added to enable it to search for fast radio burst (FRB) during its observations. The design and calibration of this backend, and the real time search pipeline for it are described in this paper. It is capable of forming 16 digital beams for each linear polarisation, covering an area of 19.6 square degrees. The search pipeline is capable of searching for, recording and classifying FRBs automatically in real time. In commissioning, we succeeded in capturing the signal pulses from the pulsars PSR B0329+54 and B2021+51., Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, RAA accepted

We present the science case for surveys with the Tianlai dish array interferometer tuned to the $\left[ 1300, 1400 \right] \mathrm{MHz}$ frequency range. Starting from a realistic generation of mock visibility data according to the survey strategy, we reconstruct a map of the sky and perform a foreground subtraction. We show that a survey of the North Celestial Polar cap during a year of observing time and covering an area of $150 \, \mathrm{deg^2}$ would reach a sensitivity of $ 1.5-2 \, \mathrm{mK} $ per $1 \, \mathrm{MHz} \times 0.25^2 \, \mathrm{deg^2 }$ voxel and be marginally impacted by mode-mixing. Tianlai would be able to detect a handful $(\sim 10)$ of nearby massive \HI clumps as well as a very strong cross-correlation signal of 21\,cm intensity maps with the North Celestial Cap Survey optical galaxies. We have also studied the performance of a mid-latitude survey, covering $\sim 1500 \, \mathrm{deg^2}$ centered on a declination of $\delta=55^\circ$, which overlaps the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint. Despite a higher noise level for the mid-latitude survey, as well as significant distortions due to mode mixing, Tianlai would be able to detect a highly significant cross-correlation between the 21\,cm signal and the Sloan spectroscopic galaxy sample. Using the extragalactic signals from either or both of these surveys, it will be possible to assess the impact of calibration uncertainties, antenna pattern uncertainties, sources of noise, and mode mixing for future surveys requiring higher sensitivity., Comment: 20 pages, 22 figures. Submitted to MNRAS

A great challenge for 21 cm intensity mapping experiments is the strong foreground radiation which is orders of magnitude brighter than the 21cm signal. Removal of the foreground takes advantage of the fact that its frequency spectrum is smooth while the redshifted 21cm signal spectrum is stochastic. However, a complication is the non-smoothness of the instrument response. This paper describes the electromagnetic simulation of the Tianlai cylinder array, a pathfinder for 21 cm intensity mapping experiments. Due to the vast scales involved, a direct simulation requires large amount of computing resources. We have made the simulation practical by using a combination of methods: first simulate a single feed, then an array of feed units, finally with the feed array and a cylindrical reflector together, to obtain the response for a single cylinder. We studied its radiation pattern, bandpass response and the effects of mutual coupling between feed units, and compared the results with observation. Many features seen in the measurement result are well reproduced in the simulation, especially the oscillatory features which are associated with the standing waves on the reflector. The mutual coupling between feed units is quantified with S-parameters, which decrease as the distance between the two feeds increases. Based on the simulated S-parameters, we estimate the correlated noise which has been seen in the visibility data, the results show very good agreement with the data in both magnitude and frequency structures. These results provide useful insights on the problem of 21cm signal extraction for real instruments., Comment: 24 pages, 24 figures

Hydrogen intensity mapping is a new field in astronomy that promises to make three-dimensional maps of the matter distribution of the Universe using the redshifted $21\,\textrm{cm}$ line of neutral hydrogen gas (HI). Several ongoing and upcoming radio interferometers, such as Tianlai, CHIME, HERA, HIRAX, etc. are using this technique. These instruments are designed to map large swaths of the sky by drift scanning over periods of many months. One of the challenges of the observations is that the daytime data is contaminated by strong radio signals from the Sun. In the case of Tianlai, this results in almost half of the measured data being unusable. We try to address this issue by developing an algorithm for solar contamination removal (AlgoSCR) from the radio data. The algorithm is based on an eigenvalue analysis of the visibility matrix, and hence is applicable only to interferometers. We apply AlgoSCR to simulated visibilities, as well as real daytime data from the Tianlai dish array. The algorithm can remove most of the solar contamination without seriously affecting other sky signals and thus makes the data usable for certain applications.