Reduction of Phase Noise in Interferometry with State-Space Analysis

In radio mapping, one of the problems encountered is the random bias in the visibility estimate. The bias can be divided into two parts: (a) the positive bias due to the common sky background seen by all elements of the interferometer, and (b) the negative bias due to phase noise present in the system. The first kind of bias can be easily removed by subtracting the correlation between the signals at two interferometer sites when the source is not in the antenna beams from that measured with the source in the antenna beams. This bias will therefore not be considered here. In contrast, the second kind of bias is more difficult to remove. When the signal-to-noise ratio of the interferometer system is high, incoherent averaging techniques can be utilized in the fringe frequency or in the time domain (Clark et al., 1969; Moran, 1973).