2.0 : Signal with Bandwidth

2.0.0: cos\cos Interferometer

The analysis on monochromatic interferometry is nice and all but is not practical. In practice, due to the limitation of physics, hardware, and DSP algorithm, the observation is always made over a finite bandwidth centered at instead of a single frequency.

Assume that the brightness magnitude over the narrow bandwidth (achieved by channelizations in DSP) is constant then the signal arrived at the station at each slice of the channel is:

So with that, let's redo the calculation for cosine interferometry output :


Before we proceed, we insert a phase center (add an artificial delay for station ) like the figure below. We will explain why adding that is necessary.

Figure

(the underlined integral term = 0 is from Time average of cosine for fast varying random phase )

The final quasi-monochromatic cosine interferometer visibility is:

then applying the geometric tricks we have shown you in 1.1 cos\cos Interferometer - 1.1.4: Putting It All Together :

given:

so:

Compare to the visibility of monochromatic interferometer with phase center:

The visibility of quasi-monochromatic interferometer has this extra term of

Notice because of the function, you should see why we need to insert a phase center, which is equivalent as adding the artificial delay which should be calculated to be very close to the geometric delay such that you can squish the function to , or else = 0 and you get 0 for the Visibility.


In real VLBI observation, you insert the by delaying one of the station's signal when calculating the correlation.




2.0.1: cos\cos Fringe

The interactive figure below shows that with the introduction of , you can see that if the phase center is not close to source , the Visibility value (the blue dot ) is easily squashed to 0.

Figure :


Fringe for Quasi-monochromatic Wave: draggable




2.0.2: Two or More Sources

Now let's see the case for 2 sources for station :

signal:

signal:

Now let's calculate the visibility with the phase center :

The calculation for single source shown above can be applied directly to :

As for , they basically have the same form, so if we can prove , then is also 0.

(The two integrals = 0 are from Time average of cosine for fast varying random phase )

So finally:

For sources, you can just simply add them up:




2.0.3: 1D FT Visibility

Now suppose we have sources in the sky with 2 stations, then then the summation over above turn into integrals:

Assuming that:

  • we are looking only at the line segment that is close to the phase center ( )
  • bandwidth is small

Then we can do the following approximation:

so with the 2 assumptions above, we have:

Now we put them together and create a new function , the Visibility Function:

It is a Fourier Transform!!!

With