Epoch of Reionisation

The Murchison Widefield Array is designed to measure the fluctuations in the 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionisation. The new hex configuration is explicitly designed to test the predicted increase in sensitivity of redundant baselines. However the challenge of the new array is to understand calibration with the new configuration. We have developed two new pipelines to reduce the hex data, and will compare the results with previous datasets from the Phase 1 array. We have now processed 80 hours of data refining the data analysis through our two established Phase 1 pipelines. This proposal requests as much observing time as possible in semester 2017-A to (1) obtain a comparable hex dataset to test the sensitivity and systematic limits with redundant arrays,(2) establish the optimal observing strategy for an EoR detection, and (3) continue to explore observational strategies in the …