Specialized Observational Techniques

In VLBA polarimetric observations, channels are assigned in pairs to opposite hands of circular polarization at each frequency.  Typical "impurities" of the antenna feeds are about 3% for the center of most VLBA bands and degrade toward the band edges and away from the pointing center in the image plane.  Without any polarization calibration, an unpolarized source will appear to be polarized at the 2% level.  Furthermore, without calibration of the RCP-LCP phase difference, the polarization angle is undetermined.  With a modest investment of time spent on calibrators and some increased effort in the calibration process, the instrumental polarization can be reduced to less than 0.5%.

To permit calibration of the feed impurities (sometime also called "leakage" or "D-terms"), VLBA users should include observations of a strong (≈ 1 Jy) calibration source, preferably one with little structure.  This source should be observed during at least 5 scans covering a wide range (> 100 degrees) of parallactic angle, with each scan lasting for several minutes.  The electric vector polarization angle (EVPA) of the calibrator will appear to rotate in the sky with parallactic angle while the instrumental contribution stays constant.  Some popular calibrator choices are J0555+3948=DA193 and J1407+2827=OQ208, although either or both may be inappropriate for a given frequency or an assigned observing time.  Fortunately, many calibrators satisfying the above criteria are available.

A viable alternative approach to measuring polarization leakage is to use an unpolarized calibrator source.  This can be done with a single scan.

With the advent of the RDBE and wide channel bandwidths, it appears that the instrumental polarization terms may vary across individual channels.  Most VLBI calibrators are resolved, and the usual AIPS tool for solving for instrumental polarization using resolved sources, LPCAL, does not handle this frequency dependence.  Procedures are being tested for dealing with this issue.  They are likely to involve making polarization images based on the best LPCAL results, using them to divide the data, then using the frequency dependence capability in PCAL to do the rest.

To set the absolute EVPA on the sky, it is necessary to determine the phase difference between RCP and LCP.  For VLBA users at frequencies of 5 GHz and above, the best method for EVPA calibration is to observe one or two of the compact sources that are being monitored with the VLA; see the VLA/VLBA Polarization Calibration Page (Taylor & Myers 2000).  At 1.6 GHz it may be preferable to observe a source with a stable, long-lived jet component with known polarization properties.  At frequencies of 5 GHz and below one can use J0521+1638=3C138 (Cotton et al. 1997a), J1331+3030=3C286 (Cotton et al. 1997b), J1829+4844=3C380 (Taylor 1998), or J1902+3159=3C395 (Taylor 2000). At 8 GHz and above one may use J1256-0547=3C279 (Taylor 1998) or J2136+0041=2134+004 (Taylor 2000), although beware that some of these jet components do change on timescales of months to years.  It will be necessary to image the EVPA calibrator in Stokes I, Q, and U, and  to determine the appropriate correction to apply.  Thus it is recommended to obtain 2 to 4 scans, each scan lasting at least 3 minutes, over as wide a range in hour angle as is practical.

To permit calibration of the RCP-LCP delays, VLBA users should include a 2-minute observation of a very strong (≈ 10 Jy) calibration source.  While 3C279 is a good choice for this delay calibration, any very strong fringe-finder will suffice.

Post-processing steps include amplitude calibration; fringe-fitting; solving for the RCP-LCP delay; self-calibration and Stokes I image formation; instrumental polarization calibration; setting the absolute position angle of electric vectors on the sky; and correction for ionospheric Faraday rotation, if necessary (Cotton 1995b, 1999a; Kemball 1999).  All these post-processing steps can currently be done in AIPS, as can the polarization self-calibration technique described by Leppänen, Zensus, & Diamond (1995).

Pulsar observing is an expert mode of the VLBA, requiring additional understanding and effort on the part of the user.  Those willing to learn to use them can take advantage of the following enhanced capabilities supporting pulsar observations, available in the DiFX correlator:

1. Binary Gating: A simple pulse-phase driven on-off accumulation window can be specified, with "on" and "off" phases.  Such gating increases the signal to noise ratio of pulsar observations by a factor of typically 3 to 6, and can also be used to search for off-pulse emission.
2. Matched-filter Gating: If the pulse profile at the observation frequency is well understood and the pulse phase is very well predicted by the provided pulse ephemeris, additional signal to noise over binary gating can be attained by appropriately scaling the correlation coefficients as a function of pulse phase.  Depending on the pulse shape, additional gains of up to 50% in sensitivity over binary gating can be realized.
3. Pulsar Binning: This mode entails generating a separate visibility spectrum for each requested range of pulse phase.  There are no explicit limits to the number of pulse phase bins that are supported, however, data rates can become increasingly large.  Currently AIPS does not support databases with multiple phase bins.  Until post-processing support is available, a separate FITS file will be produced for each pulsar phase bin.

In all cases, the user will be responsible for providing a pulsar spin ephemeris.  Except for certain applications of mode 3, the ephemeris must be capable of predicting the absolute rotation phase of the pulsar.  Pulsar modes incur a minimum correlation-time penalty of about 50%.  High output data rates may require greater correlator resource allocations.  Details of pulsar observing, including practical aspects of using the pulsar modes, and limitations imposed by operations, are documented by Brisken & Deller (2010).

Diamond (1995) and Reid (1995, 1999) describe the special requirements for data acquisition, correlation, and post-processing of spectroscopic VLBI observations.  The transition rest frequency, approximate velocity, and velocity width for the line target must be known in order to set the observing frequency and bandwidth correctly.  The schedule should include observations of one or more strong continuum sources to be used for fringe-finding, "manual" phase calibration, and bandpass calibration.  In addition, scans of a continuum source reasonably close to the line target should be scheduled, for use in delay and fringe-rate calibration.  The pulse cal generators should be disabled.

Post-processing steps include performing Doppler corrections for the Earth's orbital motion (a correction for Earth rotation is not necessary for VLBA observations since station-based fringe rotation is applied in the correlator); amplitude calibration using single-antenna spectra; fringe fitting the continuum calibrators and applying the results to the line target; referencing phases to a strong spectral feature in the line source itself; deciding whether to use normal synthesis imaging or fringe rate mapping; and then forming a spectral line cube.  All these post-processing steps can be done in AIPS.

Data reduction techniques for VLBI spectral line polarimetry are discussed by Kemball, Diamond, & Cotton (1995) and Kemball (1999).