Astronomy and Astrophysics Seminars

Building an FFT Correlator for the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array

by Ms. Deepthi Gorthi (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at DAA Seminar room (A-269)
Description
A correlator is the electronic back end of a radio interferometer that cross-correlates pairs of antennas, eventually to build an image of the sky. I will try to convince you that this is mathematically equivalent to computing a Fourier transform of the array (and explain what that means) and present a new design for correlators that will make them much faster and cheaper to build. I will also talk about the challenges involved in building such an instrument, the arrays it will be most useful for and what that means for the future of low frequency radio astronomy.