A PER-BASELINE, DELAY-SPECTRUM TECHNIQUE FOR ACCESSING THE 21 cm COSMIC REIONIZATION SIGNATURE

A critical challenge in measuring the power spectrum of 21cm emission from cosmic reionization is compensating for the frequency dependence of an interferometer’s sam-pling pattern, which can cause smooth-spectrum foregrounds to appear unsmooth and degrade the separation between foregrounds and the target signal. In this paper, we present an approach to foreground removal that explicitly accounts for this frequency de-pendence. We apply the delay transformation introduced in Parsons Backer (2009) to each baseline of an interferometer to concentrate smooth-spectrum foregrounds within the bounds of the maximum geometric delays physically realizable on that baseline. By focusing on delay-modes that correspond to image-domain regions beyond the horizon, we show that it is possible to avoid the bulk of smooth-spectrum foregrounds. We map the point-spread function of delay-modes to k-space, showing that delay-modes that are uncorrupted by foregrounds also represent samples of the three-dimensional power spectrum, and can be used to constrain cosmic reionization. Because it uses only spectral smoothness to differentiate foregrounds from the targeted 21cm signature, this