2024/11/27 by Tao-Chung Ching, Carl Heiles, Ching, Tao-Chung +13
Engineering · Environmental Science · #Optical Polarization and Ellipsometry #Calibration and Measurement Techniques #Soil Moisture and Remote Sensing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.18763
We present the polarization calibration of the 19-beam receiver at 1420 MHz within the full illumination of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope from October 2018 to March 2023. We perform spider observations to characterize the on-axis Mueller matrix of the central beam. The calibrated polarization percentage and polarization angle of a source with strong linear polarization emission are about 0.2% and 0.5∘. Several parameters of the central-beam Mueller matrix show time variability from months to years, suggesting relatively frequent polarization calibrations are needed. We obtain the Mueller matrix parameters of the 18 off-center beams with the combination of on-the-fly observations and spider observations. The polarization calibration provides consistent fractional Stokes parameters of the 19 beams, although the Mueller matrix parameters of the off-center beams are not as accurate as those of the central beam. The Mueller matrix parameters of the central beam do not show a strong dependence on the reflector surface. However, we notice different off-center Mueller matrix parameters between the eastern and western sides of the reflector surface. We provide average parameters of the 19-beam Mueller matrices which should be applicable to observations from 2020 to 2022 with several caveats. After applying the average parameters, on-axis fractional linear polarization measurements \gtrsim 10% and on-axis fractional circular polarization measurements \gtrsim 1.5% can be considered high-confidence detections. For sources with weak polarization, timely polarization calibrations using spider observations are required.