S. Chiarucci and S. J. Wijnholds, "Blind calibration of radio
interferometric arrays using sparsity constraints and its implications
for self-calibration," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society, V474, no. 1, pp1028-1040, February 2018.
abstract:
Blind calibration, i.e., calibration without a priori knowledge of the
source model, is robust to the presence of unknown sources such as
transient phenomena or (low power) broadband RFI that escaped
detection. In this paper, we present a novel method for blind
calibration of a radio interferometric array assuming that the
observed field only contains a small number of discrete point
sources. We show the huge computational advantage over previous blind
calibration methods and we assess its statistical efficiency and its
robustness to noise and the quality of the initial estimate. We
demonstrate the method on actual data from a LOFAR LBA station showing
that our blind calibration is able to recover the same gain solutions
as the regular calibration approach, as expected from theory and
simulations. We also discuss the implications of our findings for the
robustness of regular self-calibration to poor starting models.
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