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Physics Astrophysics Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

astro-ph.IM Watch Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Monday 10 August

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Foreground Subtraction with a Tensor-Based Oriented Singular Value Decomposition Method for HI Experiments

Shifan Zuo, Xuelei Chen and Yi Mao

We introduce a native tensor-based framework for foreground mitigation in 21\,cm intensity mapping (IM), utilizing the Oriented Singular Value Decomposition (O-SVD) algorithm. While 21\,cm IM is a powerful probe of the large-scale structure of the Universe, its efficacy is severely limited by astrophysical foregrounds that are orders of magnitude brighter than the cosmological signal. Traditional mitigation strategies often necessitate flattening multidimensional data cubes into two-dimensional matrices, a process that potentially compromises the intrinsic spatial-spectral correlations by treating distinct spatial pixels as independent samples. By treating multi-frequency sky maps and angular power spectra as third-order tensors, the O-SVD method performs decomposition directly on the multilinear manifold, preserving the underlying physical topology and leveraging the distinct coherence properties of astrophysical foregrounds across different dimensions. We demonstrate the performance and versatility of the O-SVD framework through its application to high-fidelity simulations from the SKA Science Data Challenge 3a (SDC3a) and real-world observational data from the Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder Array. Our results indicate that O-SVD provides a robust and universal approach for foreground subtraction, achieving high-fidelity signal recovery while offering superior performance compared to conventional matrix-based Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) methods.
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Sunday 9 August

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Horizon-Dependent Tube MPC for Spacecraft Rendezvous on Elliptical Orbits with Conditional Robust Constraint Satisfaction

Omer Burak Iskender

Spacecraft rendezvous on elliptical orbits must hold a safety corridor under navigation noise, unmodelled perturbations, and thrust errors driven by propellant mass uncertainty. This paper develops a tube-based model predictive controller for the Yamanaka-Ankersen linear time-varying dynamics, carrying constraint-tightening tube methods from circular to elliptical orbits. A horizon-dependent, element-wise error bound propagates the actual closed-loop matrices along the prediction window, so early prediction steps keep nearly the full corridor that a constant-width tube would surrender. A multiplicative-to-additive conversion folds mass and thrust uncertainty into the same tightening recursion, and a Perron-Frobenius spectral-radius condition supplies a computable certificate that the tightening converges, with an explicit input-to-state stability gain. In a paired Monte Carlo campaign on a Mars sample-return orbit, the tube controller cuts mean corridor violations by more than an order of magnitude against a nominal predictive baseline at comparable fuel cost. A nonlinear truth-model test with oblateness perturbations well beyond the assumed disturbance budget leaves the corridor unviolated, and when the design envelope is exceeded the tightened problem becomes infeasible and the controller reverts to a saturated linear fallback, making the loss of guarantee explicit rather than silent. The construction requires only element-wise arithmetic and an open-source quadratic-programming solver.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

A Hybrid R-Theta Fiber Positioning Robot Using a Piezoelectric Bender for Radial Motion

Michael Schubnell, Tim Fanning, Andrew Hope et al. (+3 more)

Future massively multiplexed spectroscopic surveys require focal planes with increasingly dense arrays of robotic fiber positioners. The DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) fiber positioners, based on a two-axis Theta-Phi motorized architecture, have demonstrated excellent reliability and performance during operations and provide the benchmark for evaluating new concepts. However, proposed next-generation instruments such as Spec-S5 require a substantially smaller positioner pitch than DESI, making direct scaling of the existing design challenging. Here we describe a hybrid R-Theta fiber positioning concept in which the rotation about the central axis is provided by a DESI-like Theta motor, while the radial displacement is produced by a piezoelectric bimorph bender coupled to a lightweight carbon-fiber spine. This design builds on the heritage of the the proven central rotation mechanism while replacing the Phi arm with a compact piezoelectric actuator. We discuss the trade-offs between motorized positioners, piezoelectric slip-stick tilting spines, tubular piezo actuators, and direct piezo-bender actuation. A prototype based on a DESI positioner was fabricated and tested using a commercial bimorph bender and an 8-inch carbon-fiber extension. With closed-loop control using feedback from a fiber-view camera the fiber was brought on target after two corrections with residual stability of approximately 2 microns RMS. These results indicate that direct piezo-bender actuation is a promising approach for compact fiber positioning, provided that closed-loop operation is addressed.
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All authors Michael Schubnell, Tim Fanning, Andrew Hope, Joseph Silber, Greg Tarlé, Nicholas Wenner

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

The James Webb Space Telescope Absolute Flux Calibration. VI. Near-Infrared Camera Imaging and Coronagraphy

Martha L. Boyer, Benjamin Sunnquist, Bryan Hilbert et al. (+4 more)

We present an updated flux calibration for all imaging modes of the Near-Infrared Camera on JWST that converts instrumental units to physical surface brightness units of MJy sr^-1. This calibration includes observations of 19 flux standard stars spanning 3.5 years, with a mix of A dwarfs, solar analogs, and hot stars. All 5 coronagraphic setups, all 29 filters, and both weak lenses are calibrated. This is the first on-sky calibration for the weak lenses used in Time Series observations and for secondary coronagraphic configurations (long wavelength masks paired with short wavelength filters, and vice versa). We also assess count-rate differences between subarrays and the full frame, finding differences of up to ~1%. These differences are incorporated into the calibration factors. We find that the scatter in the calibration factor is typically <2%, with about half of the filter+detector[+mask] combinations reaching <1% scatter. There are no trends with detector effects such as the count rate and well depth. Images in a handful of filters of the Large Magellanic Cloud and globular cluster 47 Tuc show that residual detector-to-detector offsets are typically small (<1%), but can be as high as 4-5%. The NIRCam detectors are found to be quite stable, with possible count-rate decreases of <0.4% per year, which is within the calibration uncertainties. These new calibration factors were incorporated into the JWST pipeline in 2026 March.
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All authors Martha L. Boyer, Benjamin Sunnquist, Bryan Hilbert, Dan Coe, Varun Bajaj, Paul Bennet, Julien Girard

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

QUIJOTE scientific results - XX. Commissioning and First Results from the Thirty and Forty Gigahertz Instrument (TFGI)

M. Fernández-Torreiro, J. A. Rubiño-Martín, R. T. Génova-Santos et al. (+16 more)

We present the commissioning and first results of the Thirty and Forty Gigahertz Instrument (TFGI), which observes the sky at 31 and 41 GHz with angular resolutions of 21' and 18' from the second QUIJOTE telescope at the Teide Observatory. Its primary goal is to conduct a deep cosmological survey in selected regions of the Northern sky with high-sensitivity polarization measurements. The commissioning phase covered Nov2021-Oct2022, during which the instrument operated with a configuration of 7 receivers, 4 at 31 GHz and 3 at 41 GHz. Over this period, approximately 1200 h of data were acquired. Of these, 380 h were dedicated to calibration sources, used to characterize the instrumental properties of TFGI, including the pointing model, beam response, gain stability, polarimetric performance, and instantaneous sensitivity. We provide a detailed characterization of these properties and describe how they are being improved for future observing runs. We use 230 h of observations from bright Galactic regions (Cygnus, W43, W44, and W47) to further validate the instrument performance. As an illustrative example, we present the intensity and polarization spectral energy distributions of W44, finding good agreement with existing measurements. From the noise map of these observations, we measure a polarization sensitivity of ~8.3 $\mu$K deg$^{-1}$ after an effective observing depth of 0.57 h deg$^{-2}$. This performance, achieved considering only 2 detectors at 31 GHz, is already comparable to that achieved by WMAP (with almost 3 times the integration time per unit area, 1.61 h deg$^{-2}$). Extrapolating these results to the full TFGI array, with up to 29 detectors, we show that the instrument is expected to reach the target sensitivity of ~ 1 $\mu$K deg$^{-1}$ at both 31 and 41 GHz over three cosmological fields covering a total area of 3600 deg$^2$ after an effective integration time of 5.7 years.
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All authors M. Fernández-Torreiro, J. A. Rubiño-Martín, R. T. Génova-Santos, G. Pascual-Cisneros, A. Fasano, F. J. Casas, R. J. Hoyland, M. W. Peel, C. H. López-Caraballo, U. Bose, R. Rebolo, K. Aryan, R. B. Barreiro, R. Cepeda-Arroita, D. Herranz, E. Martínez-González, F. Poidevin, R. Puddu, P. Vielva

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.GA

Exploration of UV-bright sources in Globular cluster NGC 3201 using UVIT observations

Manasi Kulkarni, Sonika Piridi, Ranjan Kumar et al. (+1 more)

We present a comprehensive study of the ultraviolet (UV)-bright stellar population in the globular cluster NGC 3201 using the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard AstroSat. By combining far-UV photometry of the UVIT F148W and F169M filters with Gaia and ground-based telescope optical data, we construct UV$-$optical color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) to identify UV-bright stellar evolutionary phases. Physical parameters of all detected sources are derived by fitting stellar atmosphere models to the observed multi-wavelength spectral energy distributions (SEDs). The effective temperatures of blue horizontal branch stars (BHBs) span the range 7250$-$11250 K. We identify two extreme horizontal-branch stars (EHBs) with effective temperatures of approximately 25,000 K and 17,000 K; one lies within the cluster core radius ($r_\mathrm{c}$=1.3$'$), while the other is located outside. We also detect two candidate “gap” objects in the transitional phase between HB stars and white dwarfs, which may represent hot blue hook (BHk) stars. For the blue straggler stars (BSSs), we determine effective temperatures, radii, and luminosities through SED fittings, and estimate their masses and isochrone-equivalent ages using PARSEC isochrones. Finally, we studied the normalized cumulative radial distribution of the observed BHB stars, BSSs, MS stars, RGB stars, and variable stars along with the specific frequency of BSSs across the cluster. These results provide new insights into the late-stage stellar evolution and dynamical processes in NGC 3201.
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All authors Manasi Kulkarni, Sonika Piridi, Ranjan Kumar, Ananta C. Pradhan

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.SR

FORTVSH: A Fortran Library For Vector Spherical Harmonics Computations

Justin G. Elfritz

The vector spherical harmonics (VSH) are crucial ingredients for representation of arbitrary vector fields in curvilinear coordinate systems throughout mathematical physics. Performant, efficient computations of the VSH are essential to high-performance computing applications that utilize spectral analysis, including magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations for geophysics and astrophysics. The free open-source FORTVSH library provides a catalog of numerical routines for evaluating various VSH forms and related mathematical functions. This manuscript establishes the theoretical basis, addresses the computational need for efficient VSH solvers, and presents a comprehensive overview of the FORTVSH routines.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.GA

A Catalog of Giant Radio Source Candidates from TGSS ADR1 Using a Deep Learning–based Pipeline

Baoqiang Lao, Binghua Liang, Shaoguang Guo et al. (+4 more)

We present a catalog of 5,595 giant radio source (GRS) candidates, defined by a largest (projected) linear size (LLS) exceeding 0.7 Mpc. Of these, 4,566 would be new discoveries if confirmed. These candidates were identified through a systematic and automated search of the first Alternative Data Release of the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey (TGSS ADR1) using a deep learning–based pipeline that incorporates a radio sources detection model and the likelihood ratio method. Across the full sample, the LLS reaches up to $\sim$4.5~Mpc, with redshifts ranging from $z=0.056$ to at least $z=2.385$. The catalog comprises 4,210 giant radio galaxies and 1,030 giant radio quasars, with the remaining 355 candidates currently unclassified. We systematically analyze the distributions of their key physical properties, including spectral index, bending angle (BA), radio power ($P_{150}$), and $r$-band absolute magnitude. Our results show that GRS candidates are predominantly straight (a median BA of $11.0^\circ$) and follow an “L-shaped" BA–LLS distribution. The radio power vs. LLS ($P_{150}$–$D$) diagram reveals a concentration at $P_{150} < 10^{28}$ W Hz$^{-1}$, while rare high-power outliers ($>10^{28.5}$ W Hz$^{-1}$) with LLS $>$ 1 Mpc challenge self-similar evolutionary models. Additionally, 286 GRS candidates are found to be associated with cataloged galaxy clusters.
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All authors Baoqiang Lao, Binghua Liang, Shaoguang Guo, Junxiu Liu, Xiaolong Yang, Rushuang Zhao, Yang Kun

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Estimating Uncertainty in Galaxy Morphology Classification

Kai Cheng, Ruoqi Wang and Qiong Luo

Astronomers classify galaxy morphology to investigate cosmic evolution. While deep foundation models are increasingly utilized in Galaxy Morphology Classification (GMC), little work has been done on evaluating the uncertainty of GMC results. Uncertainty evaluation is important because astronomical data are inherently noisy due to instrumental and environmental limitations. Also, the continuous evolution of galaxies creates intrinsic morphological ambiguity. However, current foundation models operate as deterministic point estimators, failing to quantify the uncertainty. To overcome this limitation, we propose UEGMC, a post-hoc framework of Uncertainty Estimation for Galaxy Morphology Classification. It categorizes uncertainty in GMC into distinct types by model parameters, astronomical data, reference standards, or intrinsic physical ambiguities, thereby facilitating better classification. Our framework can directly predict uncertainties from representations extracted from the frozen backbones of foundation models, without computationally expensive sampling, therefore enabling fine-grained uncertainty evaluations. Our experimental results demonstrate that UEGMC provides competitive uncertainty quantification performance compared with previous methods.
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Saturday 8 August

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Efficient searches of small signals across two-channel noisy data: a challenge in Big Data observations

Maryam Aghaei Abchouyeh and Maurice H.P.M. van Putten

Searching for novel small signals in noisy data is preferably pursued by correlation in two or more independently operating channels. Signals of potential interest exist in tails beyond $\kappa\sigma$, where $\kappa$ denotes a multiple of the standard deviation $\sigma$ of the data. Since moving data is a major cost factor in Big Data analysis and heterogeneous computing more generally, efficiency may be optimized by restricting the correlations computation to the tails of two-channel data exceeding $\kappa\sigma$. Already, a moderate value $\kappa\gtrsim2$ realizes a data-reduction by at least an order of magnitude. Here, we study this approach using a novel Excess Probability Ratio (EPR), correlating Boolean data resulting from tails beyond a cut-off $\kappa\sigma$. We compare and rank EPR performance against conventional direct cross-correlation (DCC) and Pearson coefficient (PC), applicable to the original data with no cut-off. This benchmark is performed over different combinations of background noise Gaussian, Poisson and Uniform and signals Gaussian, Poisson, Uniform, Chirps and Sine waves. Results show performance of EPR to be comparable to that of PC, providing a new approach for significant improvements in efficiency with essentially no loss of sensitivity, relevant to the present era of Big Data observatories.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Multi-night photometric repeatability of STDWeb: an empirical error budget from a 14-night campaign on a single field

Pierre-Yves Lechapelain

Web-based photometric pipelines such as STDWeb are routinely used by small observatories and professional-amateur networks across the full range of photometric science: variable stars, supernovae, exoplanet transits, transient follow-up. The formal magnitude uncertainty they report describes a single reduction of a single frame; campaign science instead requires the scatter of the same star, same field, night after night. We measure this empirically on the field of the Einstein Probe trigger EP-WXT 01709274151, observed on 14 nights in 2026 July: 157 Gaia-like G exposures reduced homogeneously with STDWeb, analysed through 101 constant field stars (10.5<G<14.5). The median formal error is 8.1 mmag (6.7 mmag for the bright half), and within a single night the empirical differential scatter matches it ($\chi_{\rm within}\simeq1$). Used naively - taking the pipeline's mag_calib, which lives in the instrumental pseudo-band - each star acquires a night-level offset of 7-9 mmag, the campaign scatter grows to 11-12 mmag, and the formal error is roughly half of the true one ($\chi_{\rm camp}=1.5$-$1.7$). We show that this entire excess is the epoch-dependent colour term: analysing the catalogue-system magnitude $m_{\rm sys}$ = mag_calib + colour term x (BP-RP) collapses the night term to 3.4 mmag, restores $\chi_{\rm camp}=1.0$-$1.1$, and improves the absolute Gaia-anchored per-star repeatability from 43 to 9.5 mmag, with the nightly zero-point peak-to-peak shrinking from 130 to 11 mmag and the airmass and colour correlations of the residuals vanishing. Stellar colours fitted from the light curves themselves reproduce Gaia BP-RP to 0.027 mag (r=0.98) and yield an identical budget: the correction needs no external colour catalogue. We provide the closed variance decomposition, practical recommendations, and a cautionary note on re-deriving zero points outside the pipeline.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Design and simulation of a photonic lantern-inspired astrophotonic chip for spectral sensing

Avi Patel, Kevin A. Bundy, Aditya Sengupta et al. (+10 more)

Compact astrophotonic sensors can trade general-purpose spectral coverage for task-specific wavelength discrimination in a small integrated footprint. Developed with the Mazin Lab at UC Santa Barbara, this chip couples a single-mode input into a multimode interference region and seven-port fanout, producing wavelength-dependent output power fingerprints for spectral retrieval. Using ANSYS Lumerical FDTD simulations in silicon nitride, we compare symmetric and staggered-release geometries and quantify throughput, wavelength-dependent changes in the seven-port output distribution, and sensitivity near a 745 nm design point. We optimize over the tested geometric parameter space and identify designs with improved throughput and wavelength discrimination, including increased throughput-weighted Fisher information relative to the baseline. These results suggest that lantern-inspired integrated photonics can enable compact, task-specific spectral sensors for astrophotonic applications.
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All authors Avi Patel, Kevin A. Bundy, Aditya Sengupta, Matthew C. DeMartino, Anna Gagnebin, Emiel Por, Majid Mohammad, Michael Arena, Aled Cuda, Kiana Ejercito, Stephen Eikenberry, Ben Mazin, Holger Schmidt

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Design evolution for the Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope

Will Saunders, Corentin Cudennec, Roland Bacon et al. (+4 more)

WST is proposed as the next large ESO project to follow ELT, combining Multi-Object Spectroscopy and Integral Field Spectroscopy. Each mode offers order-of-magnitude gains over current systems, and each also presents unprecedented design challenges, both separately and in combination. For large MOS systems, both science performance and spectrograph costs vary steeply with the delivered image quality, so exceptional delivered image quality is paramount. But the 12m aperture and 2 degree field give WST an etendue larger than Rubin, larger that LAMOST, and larger than all other existing MOS telescopes combined; while the IFS, segmented primary and windy site all add additional constraints. Hence finding designs with good image quality is challenging. Eventually, 3-lens Forward Cassegrain designs with loss-less ADC were developed in variants mostly differentiated by M2 diameter. The lowest technical risk design, with the smallest M2, was selected as the baseline, with wind-shake control a primary driver. However, other designs have better as-designed image quality, and their perceived risks may diminish as the system design and underlying technologies mature. For IFS mode, delivered image quality is just as crucial, but this is achieved through additional optics and NGS GLAO over the 3'x3' field. The challenges come from (a) transferring the F/3.4 Forward Cassegrain focus to a fixed focus under the telescope; (b) a requirement that the 3'x3' field be selectable from a 13' diameter FoV without repointing the telescope; (c) including a suitably conjugated mirror for GLAO correction; (d) doing all this with minimised vignetting and surface count. Various designs were explored; the baseline design has a field-selecting pick-off at telescope focus, combined with large reimaging optics at Nasmyth, giving an F/28.5 fixed IFS focus.
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All authors Will Saunders, Corentin Cudennec, Roland Bacon, Philippe Dierickx, Roelof de Jong, David Lee, Gaston Gausachs

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.GA

A Two-level Radial-velocity Zero-point Calibration for LAMOST MRS with Gaia and APOGEE and a Value-added RV Catalogue

Jinming Zhang and Haibo Yuan

The LAMOST Medium-Resolution Survey (MRS) provides a large stellar spectroscopic data set for Galactic kinematics and time-domain radial-velocity (RV) studies. However, the multi-spectrograph, multi-exposure, multi-fiber observing strategy can imprint RV zero-point (RVZP) systematics that vary across instrumental and temporal hierarchies. We construct a two-level empirical RVZP correction to LAMOST DR12 MRS using Gaia DR3 magnitude-colour-corrected RVs and APOGEE DR17 RVs as external references: a spectrograph-exposure correction in (lmjm, planid, spid) units, followed by a fiber-time correction in (spid, fiberid, time_tag) units. Within each unit, RVZPs are estimated from Gaia and APOGEE residuals using a weighted-median estimator, and are subtracted from the pipeline RVs to obtain corrected velocities. For high-S/N spectra, the scatter relative to APOGEE DR17 decreases from ~1.1 km/s to ~0.52 km/s after the full two-level correction, implying a ~2x improvement in RV precision. We release a value-added catalogue of two-level-corrected RVs for 11,129,477 blue-arm spectra, including 8,158,271 single-exposure spectra and 2,971,206 coadded spectra, enabling consistent RV analyses across exposures, spectrographs, fibers, and time.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Spec-S5: A Next-Generation All-Sky Spectroscopic Facility Enabling Large-Scale Surveys for Cosmology and Astrophysics

Claire Poppett, David J. Schlegel, Arjun Dey et al. (+8 more)

The Stage-5 Spectroscopic Experiment (Spec-S5) is a next-generation, all-sky spectroscopic facility designed to address fundamental questions in cosmology and astrophysics. Building on the legacy of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), Spec-S5 will upgrade two existing 4-m telescopes into 6-m, wide-field observatories, each equipped with a highly multiplexed spectrograph capable of measuring 13,000 spectra simultaneously. This overview paper summarizes the science motivation, system architecture, and integration strategy of the project. Spec-S5 will deliver a more than tenfold increase in spectroscopic capability, enabling transformative surveys in the post-Rubin, post-DESI era and advancing our understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic structure formation.
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All authors Claire Poppett, David J. Schlegel, Arjun Dey, Klaus Honscheid, Paul Martini, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Pat Jelinsky, Chang-Jin Oh, Konstantina Boutsia, Joseph H. Silber, Nicholas R. Wenner

Friday 7 August

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Partial-field inferability of galaxy overdensity structure: An information-geometric account of incomplete sky coverage

Marko Imbrišak and Krešimir Tisanić

Structural statistics of the galaxy distribution are routinely measured on only partially observed fields, yet how much structure survives incomplete coverage, and which aspects are lost first, is rarely quantified independently of the statistic being reported. We cast this as inference on a fixed structure vector Theta=(Delta_Omega, f_HD, L_HD): a global density contrast, a high-density fraction, and the connected extent of the high-density set. Densities are assigned to galaxies through their Voronoi cell areas, with connectivity on the dual Delaunay graph. Two mechanisms generate subsets, spatially correlated random-walk coverage and spatially uncorrelated node loss, and recovery is measured with a Fisher-inspired reference metric held fixed across coverage levels, mechanisms and estimators. Applied to a z-sliced COSMOS field of 94043 galaxies, the three components form a strict hierarchy: the connected extent is recovered several times less accurately than the scalar amplitudes at every incomplete coverage, by a margin that widens as coverage improves, and is the last to converge. The two mechanisms trade off in opposite directions, uniform loss preserving the amplitudes and walk coverage the morphology, so inferability depends not only on how much of the field is observed but on how it is observed. A joint single-number criterion can order the mechanisms but is tolerance dependent and can reverse, whereas the component-level contrast is metric-independent and robust; the degree-based inverse-probability weight, though natural for random-walk sampling, is inconsistent for set-valued coverage. Partial-field structure statistics therefore degrade anisotropically in information space, and a single coverage fraction is insufficient to characterise what a partially observed field can support.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.HE

Insights into the Pulsar Timing Array hypothesis space

El Mehdi Zahraoui, Patricio Maturana-Russel, Willem van Straten et al. (+2 more)

We present novel insights into the pulsar-noise model space in pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. Through a comparative analysis of the same Parkes PTA second data release observations processed with the 2020 and 2023 pipelines, we show that data processing materially changes the distribution of posterior support across competing noise hypotheses and increases sensitivity to weak contributions such as the solar wind. A solar-wind component appears in the highest-posterior hypothesis for ten pulsars under the 2023 pipeline, against four under the 2020 pipeline, while the corresponding mean electron density estimates are consistent with PPTA DR3 results. Furthermore, hypothesis-space analysis exposes model competition and degeneracies that are hidden by single-model summaries. Approximately 75% of the pulsars retain substantial posterior support for alternative noise descriptions. Therefore, understanding the nature of the pulsar noise hypothesis space is crucial for robust inference and nanohertz gravitational-wave background searches.
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All authors El Mehdi Zahraoui, Patricio Maturana-Russel, Willem van Straten, Renate Meyer, Sergei Gulyaev

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Overview and status of BICEP Array's BA4-90/150 CMB polarimeter

M. A. Petroff, P. A. R. Ade, Z. Ahmed et al. (+83 more)

The inflation paradigm postulates a period of rapid expansion in the early Universe, which would generate gravitational waves. These tensor perturbations would produce a faint B-mode signature in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), but this signal is orders of magnitude weaker than that from the CMB's other anisotropy and that from astrophysical foregrounds. Placing more-stringent upper limits on this signal or making a definitive detection thus requires exceptional control over instrument and measurement systematics, in addition to extremely-deep maps. The fourth BICEP Array receiver, BA4-90/150, aims to build and improve upon the heritage of the field-leading BICEP series of small-aperture CMB experiments with a dichroic instrument observing in 90 and 150 GHz bands, to advance the search for the inflationary B-mode signal. The instrument will utilize transition-edge-sensor bolometers, which will be read out using a new two-level time-division-multiplexed system and be fed via feedhorn-coupled orthomode transducers and refined cold refractive optics, with the goal of both improving systematics control and sensitivity over existing receivers. With a planned deployment to the South Pole in the 2026-27 austral summer, the instrument will occupy the fourth and final remaining slot in the BICEP Array mount, completing the phaseout of Keck Array receivers. An overview of the BA4-90/150 receiver will be presented, along with a discussion of its current status and future plans for the instrument.
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All authors M. A. Petroff, P. A. R. Ade, Z. Ahmed, M. Amiri, D. Barkats, R. Basu Thakur, C. A. Bischoff, D. Beck, J. J. Bock, V. Buza, B. Cantrall, J. R. Cheshire IV, J. Connors, J. Cornelison, M. Crumrine, A. J. Cukierman, E. Denison, L. Duband, M. A. Echter, M. Eiben, B. D. Elwood, S. Fatigoni, J. P. Filippini, A. Fortes, M. Gao, C. Giannakopoulos, N. Goeckner-Wald, D. C. Goldfinger, S. Gratton, J. A. Grayson, A. Greathouse, P. K. Grimes, M. Halpern, S. Henderson, T. D. Hoang, J. Hubmayr, H. Hui, K. D. Irwin, M. Izquierdo Poza, J. H. Kang, K. S. Karkare, S. Kefeli, J. M. Kovac, C. Kuo, K. Lasko, K. Lau, M. Lautzenhiser, T. Liu, S. C. Mackey, N. Maher, K. G. Megerian, L. Minutolo, L. Moncelsi, Y. Nakato, H. T. Nguyen, R. O'Brient, S. N. Paine, A. Patel, A. R. Polish, T. Prouve, C. Pryke, C. D. Reintsema, T. Romand, M. Salatino, A. Schillaci, B. Schmitt, B. Singari, A. Soliman, T. St. Germaine, A. Steiger, B. Steinbach, R. Sudiwala, K. L. Thompson, C. Tucker, A. D. Turner, C. Vergès, A. G. Vieregg, A. Wandui, A. C. Weber, J. Willmert, W. L. K. Wu, H. Yang, C. Yu, L. Zeng, C. Zhang, S. Zhang

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

On-sky capabilities and performance of the Keck All Sky Precision Adaptive Optics system

Avinash Surendran, Maxwell Service, Jacques R. Delorme et al. (+21 more)

The Keck All Sky Precision Adaptive optics (KAPA) project upgrades the Keck I adaptive optics system to enable laser tomography using a four laser guide star (LGS) asterism. KAPA is now in operation in both narrow field and wide field modes to optimize correction on-axis or over the science field of view of the camera. The use of four LGSs, in conjunction with a tomographic reconstructor and pseudo open-loop control, leads to a significant reduction in wavefront error. We describe the overall architecture, development of the tomographic algorithm, real-time implementation and preliminary on-sky results here. By comparing the on-sky image quality with that obtained using a single LGS (sLGS) we clearly demonstrate the benefits of laser tomography, a technology which is crucial to the success of the next generation of extremely large telescopes.
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All authors Avinash Surendran, Maxwell Service, Jacques R. Delorme, Carlos M. Correia, Marcos A. Van Dam, Eduardo Marin, Antonin Bouchez, Peter Wizinowich, Jason Chin, Sylvain Cetre, Sam Ragland, Uriel Conod, Jacob Taylor, Scott Lilley, Luke Gers, Ed Wetherell, Jessica Lu, Noah Stiegler, Anna Pusack, Zoe Haggard, Will Gauvin, Julien T. Bernard, Dietrich Pescoller, Roberto Biasi

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Spectrally dispersed non-redundant aperture-masking interferometry in the thermal infrared with LBTI/ALES

T. A. Stuber, J. M. Stone, J. W. Isbell et al. (+5 more)

Non-redundant aperture-masking interferometry maximizes the angular resolution of a telescope by turning it into an interferometric array using pupil plane masks. If the interference pattern on the detector is spectrally dispersed, deeper contrasts of the astrophysical scenery and an improved coverage of its spatial Fourier modes is achieved. We combined a non-redundant aperture mask with the integral field spectrograph ALES of LMIRcam at the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI). With this setup, we recorded spectrally dispersed non-redundant aperture-masking observations in the $L$ band ($\sim$3-4$\,\mu$m). We present commissioning data with which we recovered a known binary star and derived contrast detection limits for further point-source components of ${\sim} 5 \times 10^{-3}$ for separations of ${\gtrsim} 80\,$mas. This is the first time that an integral field spectrograph was combined with a non-redundant aperture mask in the $L$ band. Opening up the thermal infrared for this technique, this new capability enables the LBTI to efficiently survey nearby, bright stars for faint companions, which is of great importance for studies on hot exozodiacal dust and target vetting for future exo-Earth imaging missions such as NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory. A further application is aperture synthesis of extended sources such as active galactic nuclei or evolved stars.
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All authors T. A. Stuber, J. M. Stone, J. W. Isbell, T. De Prins, J. P. Scott, J. A. Eisner, J. Carlson, S. Ertel

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from gr-qc

The G347.3-0.5 outlier from O3: a follow-up case study for continuous gravitational-wave candidates

L. Mirasola, F. Amicucci, M. Carrio et al. (+31 more)

We report a multi-pipeline follow-up study of the continuous gravitational-wave (CW) outlier identified by the Ming et al. Einstein@Home directed search for the young supernova remnant G347.3-0.5 (containing the central compact object RXJ1713.7-3946). The outlier was initially identified in LIGO data from the O3a observing run and followed up with the addition of O3b and O4a data by the Einstein@Home pipeline, with O4a producing weaker evidence. Here, we show extended data quality checks and results from three pipelines that have independently investigated this outlier, including the newly released O4b data set. We can robustly recover the outlier in O3, while we find no evidence for a related standard CW signal in O4a (consistent with Ming et al.) and O4b data. This work serves as a useful test case for future multi-pipeline follow-ups of CW candidates that aim to investigate their astrophysical or noise nature, and it is therefore an important step in preparation for the first CW detection.
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All authors L. Mirasola, F. Amicucci, M. Carrio, D. H. T. Cheung, M. A. Ferrer-Martinez, E. Goetz, D. Keitel, A. M. Knee, P. Leaci, C. Palomba, K. Pham, O. J. Piccinni, M. Pitkin, I. Prohens, K. Riles, S. Safi-Harb, G. Woan, Z. Zhang, M. Bejger, A. Calafat, R. Jaume, D. I. Jones, A. Krolak, I. La Rosa, A. Melatos, J. R. Mérou, A. Nemmani, B. Rajbhandari, C. Salvadore, A. M. Sintes, R. Tenorio, K. Wette, J. T. Whelan, T. S. Yamamoto

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from gr-qc

Celephais: efficient spectral initial data code for precessing compact binaries

Hao-Jui Kuan

Large numerical-relativity surveys require compact-binary initial data that are both spectrally accurate and inexpensive to construct, including for systems with unequal masses and misaligned spins. We present \celephais, a compact-object initial-data code built on the Kadath spectral library, that constructs binary-neutron-star and black-hole–neutron-star initial data without imposing equatorial symmetry. The method exploits the sparse structure of the globally coupled multi-domain Jacobian and the approximate parity separation of fields. The assembled matrix is factored with MUMPS and reused as a refreshed right preconditioner in a Jacobian-free Newton–Krylov iteration, thereby avoiding dense storage. An adaptive $hp$–refinement scheme then concentrates resolution where the spectral tails are not yet resolved. For a mass-ratio-$20$ black-hole–neutron-star benchmark, the adaptive schemes recover the uniform-grid constraint accuracy with about three times fewer unknowns. We also extend the post-Newtonian force-balance estimate to arbitrary spin orientations and use it to initialise eccentricity reduction. Validation comprises binding-energy comparisons with post-Newtonian sequences, a precessing binary-neutron-star eccentricity-reduction test, and a full evolution whose waveform-reconstructed precession axis follows a post-Newtonian simple-precession model. These results establish an efficient route to spectrally resolved binary-neutron-star and black-hole–neutron-star initial data with arbitrary spin orientations.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Environmental Noise Challenges for the Einstein Telescope - A Review

Matteo Di Giovanni

Einstein Telescope (ET) will be a next-generation ground based interferometric gravitational-wave detector designed to explore the Universe to an unprecedented depth and detail. With its 10-15 km long arms, underground infrastructure, and advanced cryogenic technologies to suppress thermal noise, ET aims at achieving a sensitivity up to eight orders of magnitude better than current detectors such as Virgo, LIGO, and KAGRA. The coverage of the low-frequency band, starting at 2 Hz, will enable the observation of earlier inspiral phases of compact binary coalescences, enhancing early-warning capabilities and improving multi-messenger follow-up. However, this increased sensitivity also implies a higher susceptibility to environmental disturbances, particularly in the 2-10 Hz range where anthropogenic, seismic and infrastructural noise noise are most relevant. Therefore, understanding and mitigating environmental contributions are essential to fully exploit the scientific potential of ET. This chapter reviews the ongoing studies on environmental noise for ET, summarizes the main challenges related to site characterization and infrastructure design and outlines the strategies currently under development to ensure optimal detector performance.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.CO

Sensitivity of Next-Generation CMB Surveys to Neutrinos and Other Light Relics

Cynthia Trendafilova, Srinivasan Raghunathan, Benjamin Wallisch et al. (+33 more)

Neutrinos and other light relics leave characteristic imprints in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, making their observation a sensitive probe of the particle content and thermal history of the early universe. The energy density in these relativistic species is parameterized by their effective number $N_\mathrm{eff}$. Measuring this parameter at the percent level, which is a long-standing science goal of CMB-S4 and other experiments, would test a wide range of well-motivated physics within and beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In this paper, we present Fisher-matrix forecasts of the projected sensitivity to $N_\mathrm{eff}$ of several CMB-S4 survey configurations considered during its extensive design phase. The conceptual design reaches $\sigma(N_\mathrm{eff}) < 0.03$ over its seven-year observing period, while the revised configuration achieves the same precision over a longer timescale. We complement these results with a cosmic-variance-limited survey over the same multipole range to quantify the room for improvement accessible with additional instrumental, observational, and theoretical efforts. Finally, we discuss the broad implications of precise $N_\mathrm{eff}$ measurements for the radiation sector, big bang nucleosynthesis, light thermal relics, and other early-universe physics. The forecasts presented in this work are performed with the publicly released DRAFT (Dark Radiation Anisotropy Flowdown Team) tool. It provides an end-to-end pipeline from simulated foreground maps and component separation to delensing and projected sensitivities for any cosmological parameter, and it can be directly applied to other cosmic microwave background survey designs.
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All authors Cynthia Trendafilova, Srinivasan Raghunathan, Benjamin Wallisch, Joel Meyers, Kevork N. Abazajian, Edoardo Altamura, Carlo Baccigalupi, Kimberly K. Boddy, Thejs Brinckmann, Yuji Chinone, Gabriele Coppi, Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, Jacques Delabrouille, Katherine Freese, Helena García Escudero, Martina Gerbino, Shamik Ghosh, Vera Gluscevic, Daniel Green, Daniel Grin, Kevin M. Huffenberger, Mudit Jain, Lloyd Knox, Anto I. Lonappan, Marilena Loverde, Philip Lubin, Gabriele Montefalcone, Valentine Novosad, Marco Raveri, Christian L. Reichardt, Sayan Saha, Murali M. Saravanan, Emmanuel Schaan, Sara M. Simon, Julien Tang, Scott Watson

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Closing the loop on-sky with a vector-Zernike wavefront sensor using a convolutional neural network as phase reconstructor

Francisco Oyarzún, Mathieu Motte, Cedric-Taissir Heritier et al. (+11 more)

Context: The new giant segmented mirror telescopes will use adaptive optics to reach the fundamental limits in resolving power. To accomplish this, new wavefront sensors (WFS) have been designed to fulfill the requirements, but they may require non-linear reconstruction techniques to operate given the nature of the signal of the WFSs Aims: In this article we show that it is possible to use non-linear reconstructors to extend the dynamic range of one of the most sensitive wavefront sensors far beyond the designed limits: the Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS). Methods: We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) completely in simulation to perform the phase reconstruction of a vector-ZWFS (v-ZWFS), a higher dynamic-range variant of the ZWFS. Contrary to the linear method, the CNN uses the information across the full frame to reconstruct the phase at each point, enabling it to resolve the ambiguities introduced by the periodic response of the ZWFS and thereby extend its effective capture range. We developed a two-step training strategy that ensured closed-loop stability and used a physically informed loss function to maximize the performance of the CNN. Results: We successfully closed the loop on-sky with the v-ZWFS using the CNN in observing conditions that the linear reconstructor could not converge to a stable flat wavefront. In cases where both reconstruction methods were working, the CNN outperformed the linear method in almost all cases, and in favorable seeing conditions we were even able to close the loop with the ZWFS acting as a first stage WFS, highlighting the extended dynamic range brought by the use of a non-linear wavefront reconstructor. Conclusions: We conclude that the use of non-linear wavefront reconstructor can extend the use cases of adaptive optics systems, especially when the WFS used shows highly non-linear behaviors.
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All authors Francisco Oyarzún, Mathieu Motte, Cedric-Taissir Heritier, Benjamin González, Rodrigo Muñoz, Vincent Chambouleyron, Marie Angelie Alagao, Arnaud Striffling, Mettoe Pasinetti, Edvardas Vinerskas, Pauline Trouve-Peloux, Frederic Champagnat, Thierry Fusco, Benoit Neichel

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Telemetry is a Sensor: Opportunistic Wavefront Estimation for the James Webb Space Telescope

Lahav Buzi, Yoav Y. Schechner, Aviad Levis et al. (+1 more)

Space telescopes maintain optical alignment through periodic, resource-intensive wavefront calibration, leaving the optical state unobserved between corrections. We propose treating onboard engineering telemetry as an opportunistic wavefront sensor. Specifically, the high-cadence thermal and pointing signals already recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope may suffice to recover spatially resolved optical path difference at nanometer precision, without dedicated measurements. Our framework uses a two-stage gradient boosting regressor. It predicts optical path difference residuals for each mirror segment in a low-dimensional principal component basis. The model is trained and evaluated using data captured on-orbit during six months. Based on this limited data, optical path difference inference has high statistical significance in 13 out of 18 mirror segments. In 6 mirror segments, the model achieves explained variance above 50%. These results demonstrate feasibility for telemetry-driven wavefront estimation, as a low-overhead sensing modality. The study suggests a potential to support continuous monitoring and calibration scheduling for large segmented observatories.
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All authors Lahav Buzi, Yoav Y. Schechner, Aviad Levis, Jason J. Wang

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from gr-qc

Spotlight searches for continuous gravitational waves triggered on radiometer candidates in LIGO O4a data

Alan M. Knee, Keith Riles and Ling Sun

We report on a follow-up search for continuous gravitational waves (CWs) targeting sub-threshold candidates from the O4a LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) all-sky all-frequency (ASAF) directed radiometer analysis. We analyze a total of $562$ ASAF candidates using Advanced LIGO data from the first part of the fourth LVK observing run. Each candidate comprises a narrow $1/32$ Hz frequency band paired with a ${\sim}13$ deg$^2$ sky pixel, defining the search parameter space for our analysis. Our search pipeline leverages the $F$-statistic matched filter equipped with a hidden Markov model to enable tracking of a potentially frequency-wandering CW signal. Of the 562 initial candidates, we obtain $21$ outliers with false alarm probability less than $5\%$ that survive all instrumental vetoes. None of the outliers are recovered at comparable statistical significance in the second part of the fourth observing run, from which we conclude that no convincing CW signals are detected. We estimate the sensitivity of our analysis by recovering simulated signals added to real detector data. Across the $20\text{--}1726$ Hz frequency band, our search achieves $95\%$ detection efficiency for strain amplitudes in the range of $h_0\sim (0.63\text{--}6.3)\times10^{-25}$ with respect to isolated neutron stars (NSs), and $h_0\sim (0.82\text{--}7.1)\times10^{-25}$ with respect to NSs in long-period ($>1$ yr) binary systems. The large range in sensitivity is due to the strong frequency dependence of detector noise, particularly at low frequencies.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from math.DS

GPU-Accelerated Orbit Propagation with High-Fidelity Solar Radiation Pressure Modeling

Leandro Zardaín, Ariadna Farrés, Anna Puig et al. (+2 more)

Solar Radiation Pressure (SRP), the force exerted by photons emitted by the Sun, is one of the main non-gravitational perturbations affecting spacecraft trajectories, making its accurate modeling essential for high-fidelity orbit propagation. While physically-based ray-tracing models improve SRP accuracy, their computational cost becomes a limitation during numerical integration, where the SRP force must be evaluated repeatedly throughout the trajectory propagation. This paper investigates the integration of high-fidelity SRP models into orbit propagation through two complementary contributions: a Vulkan-based GPU implementation that accelerates direct SRP evaluation, and an extension of the SRP model to account for the dynamic orientation of solar panels. These contributions are evaluated independently through orbit propagation experiments, while a precomputed SRP interpolation strategy (SPAD) is included as an alternative approach for reducing computational cost through offline sampling and interpolation. Numerical validation shows that the Vulkan implementation preserves the accuracy of the original OpenGL-based method, showing relative differences below $5\times10^{-4}$ while achieving speed-ups of up to 9.4 for individual SRP computations and up to 15.2 for complete orbit propagation, particularly for geometrically complex spacecraft. The movable solar panel model shows that neglecting panel motion can produce significant long-term propagation errors, especially for spacecraft with large articulated solar panels, while introducing only a moderate computational overhead. Based on the experimental evaluation, this work concludes with practical guidelines for integrating high-fidelity SRP models into orbit propagation frameworks, identifying the scenarios under which interpolation-based methods are sufficient and when online high-fidelity SRP computation is justified.
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All authors Leandro Zardaín, Ariadna Farrés, Anna Puig, Kevin Muntal, Albert Mir

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

WST, the Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope: dispersing elements

Andrea Bianco, Michele Frangiamore, Anna Brucalassi et al. (+7 more)

The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST) is a proposed 12-m class facility entirely dedicated to spectroscopic surveys, combining a high-multiplex multi-object spectrograph operating at low (MOS-LR) and high (MOS-HR) spectral resolution with a giant panoramic integral-field spectrograph (IFS), all three operating in parallel. Diffraction gratings are the key dispersing elements of all three instruments and, given the very large number and size of the units required, drive critical trade-offs in throughput, feasibility and production cost. This paper reviews the two grating technologies under consideration for WST, Volume Phase Holographic Gratings (VPHG) and binary (lithographic, surface-relief) gratings, summarizing their working principles and the parameters that control their diffraction efficiency. We then present the current baseline grating parameters and vendor results for each instrument: low-dispersion, VPHGs for the IFS; a four-arm GRISM layout for MOS-LR; and two competing high-resolution disperser architectures (8M16D and 16M4D) for MOS-HR, where binary gratings show a promising path to diffraction efficiencies beyond what is achievable with VPHGs. We conclude with the main open challenges, chiefly the mass production of hundreds of grating units within cost and schedule and the next steps foreseen to consolidate the disperser baseline for WST.
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All authors Andrea Bianco, Michele Frangiamore, Anna Brucalassi, Dimitri Buffat, Corentin Cudennec, Kjetil Dohlen, Alexandre Jeanneau, David Lee, Will Saunders, Andrea Tozzi

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Cross-listed from astro-ph.EP

Pyrat Bay 2.0: an Upgraded Framework for Exoplanet Atmosphere Modeling in the JWST Era

Patricio E. Cubillos, Jasmina Blecic, Denis Shulyak et al. (+1 more)

This article presents a major update to the open-source Pyrat Bay modeling framework (version 2.0), tailored for the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres with the observational capabilities of current facilities, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and future missions. The upgraded framework introduces a standalone chemistry package, chemcat, enabling the modeling of exoplanet atmospheres via thermochemical-equilibrium calculations with custom compositions, self-consistent radiative-equilibrium thermal profiles, and equilibrium-chemistry retrievals. Other key implementations include nested sampling via MultiNest, isotopic-ratio fitting, transit light source modeling, and free-chemistry parameterization allowing vertical variations in volume mixing ratios. We validated the thermochemical- and radiative-equilibrium modules via comparisons with the GGchem, FastChem, and HELIOS codes. We present an application of the new modeling framework by conducting an atmospheric characterization study using simulated transmission spectra of high signal-to-noise observations for a gas-giant exoplanet. We found that vertical abundance variations in planetary atmospheres can be accurately recovered using data of JWST quality. In such cases, retrievals that neglect these variations may result in biased abundance constraints, e.g., when employing the commonly used free-chemistry approach assuming constant abundance profiles. The results highlight the potential of JWST to study the multi-dimensional nature of exoplanetary atmospheres and their underlying physical processes.
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All authors Patricio E. Cubillos, Jasmina Blecic, Denis Shulyak, Luca Fossati