Samuel J. George, Jeroen M. Stil, Mircea Andrecut, A. Russ Taylor
GALFACTS is a large-area spectro-polarimetric survey on the Arecibo Radio
telescope. It uses the seven-beam focal plane feed array receiver system (ALFA)
to carry out an imaging survey project of the 12,700 square degrees of sky
visible from Arecibo at 1.4 GHz with 8192 spectral channels over a bandwidth of
300 MHz sampled at 1 millisecond. The aggregate data rate is 875 MB/s. GALFACTS
observations will create full-Stokes image cubes at an angular resolution of
3.5' with a band-averaged sensitivity of 90 $\mu$Jy, allowing sensitive imaging
of polarized radiation and Faraday Rotation Measure from both diffuse emission
and extragalactic sources. GALFACTS is a scientific pathfinder to the SKA in
the area of cosmic magnetism. Key to magnetism science with the SKA is the
technique of RM synthesis. The technique of RM synthesis is introduced and we
discuss practical aspects of RM synthesis including efficient computational
techniques and detection thresholds in the resulting Faraday spectrum. We
illustrate the use of the technique by presenting the current development of
the RM synthesis pipeline for GALFACTS and present early results.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4890
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