Welcome to the SERVAL documentation

SERVAL: Spherical Expansions for Radio Visibility Analysis at Large-N

The goal of the SERVAL code is to evaluate the visibility integral by making use of spherical harmonic expansions of the multiplicative components of the integrand. The code always generated the visibility from a full earth rotation as a function of the earth rotation angle (ERA), \(\phi\).

That is it uses spherical harmonic methods to evaluate:

\[ \begin{align*} \mathcal{V}^{ij\nu}(\phi) = \int \diff\Omega~ A^{i\nu} A^{j\nu*}(\dirvec)~ \exp{\left(-2\pi i~\uvvec^{i-j}\cdot\dirvec\right)} T^{\nu}(\dirvec, \phi) \end{align*} \]

Where,

• \(A^{i\nu} A^{j\nu*}(\dirvec)\) is the primary beam term.
• \(\exp{\left(-2\pi i~\uvvec^{i-j}\cdot\dirvec\right)}\) is the baseline term
• \(T^{\nu}(\dirvec, \phi)\) is the sky term which rotates with \(\phi\) relative to the other terms.

The methodology is an extension of the \(m\)-mode methods pioneered in Shaw et al. 2014 and Shaw et al. 2015. The metholodogy is described more in the Methodology Section and will be further described in a forthcoming publication.