Polarized foreground removal at low radio frequencies using rotation measure synthesis: Uncovering the signature of hydrogen reionization

Abstract

Measurement of redshifted 21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen promises to be the most effective method for studying the reionization history of hydrogen and, indirectly, the first galaxies. These studies will be limited not by raw sensitivity to the signal, but rather, by bright foreground radiation from Galactic and extragalactic radio sources and the Galactic continuum. In addition, leakage due to gain errors and non-ideal feeds conspire to further contaminate low-frequency radio observations. This leakage leads to a portion of the complex linear polarization signal finding its way into Stokes I, and inhibits the detection of the non-polarized cosmological signal from the epoch of reionization. In this work, we show that rotation measure synthesis can be used to recover the signature of cosmic hydrogen reionization in the presence of contamination by polarized foregrounds. To achieve this, we apply the rotation measure synthesis technique to the Stokes I component of a synthetic data cube containing Galactic foreground emission, the effect of instrumental polarization leakage and redshifted 21-cm emission by neutral hydrogen from the epoch of reionization. This produces an effective Stokes I Faraday dispersion function for each line of sight, from which instrumental polarization leakage can be fitted and subtracted. Our results show that it is possible to recover the signature of reionization in its late stages (z≈ 7) by way of the 21-cm power spectrum, as well as through tomographic imaging of ionized cavities in the intergalactic medium. © 2011 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.