Commissioning LOFAR for polarisation observations

• Applicants: Dr. Rainer Beck; Professor Dr. Ulrich Klein
• Subject Area: Astrophysics and Astronomy
• Term: from 2010 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 108727618

• Final Report Year: 2017

Final Report Abstract

Within project A 9 of the Research Unit, a code that calculates the amount of ionospheric Faraday rotation for a specific epoch, geographic location, and line-of-sight was developed. Another main achievements of the project were significant contributions to the development of calibration pipelines that address the two main problems of LOFAR imaging: the large amount of data and the need for direction dependent calibration. These allowed us to obtain high-quality images of several spiral galaxies. The project supported numerous PhD students at universities in Germany and in other countries. The work funded by the DFG Research Unit also supported the collaboration between the German universities that are members of the GLOW consortium and the development of the GLOW mode which allows connecting of a LOFAR station from anywhere on the GLOW virtual network, control the station, and have the data sent to a recording computer anywhere on the GLOW network.

Publications

• 2013, A&A, 552, 58
  Sotomayor-Beltran, C., Sobey, C., Anderson, J., Beck, R., Bonafede, A., Brüggen, M., Dettmar, R.-J. et al.
  
• 2013, A&A, 556, 2
  van Haarlem, M.P., Wise, M.W., Beck, R., Bonafede, A., Brüggen, M., Dettmar, R.-J. et al.
  
• 2013, A&A, 558, 72
  Iacobelli, M., Haverkorn, M., Beck, R., Bonafede, A., Dettmar, R.-J. et al.
  
• 2013, A&A, 560, 98
  Schellart, P., Nelles, A., Horneffer, A. et al.
  
• 2013, AN, 334, 548
  Beck, R., Anderson, J., Heald, G., Horneffer, A. et al.
  
• 2014, A&A, 568, 74
  Mulcahy, D.D., Horneffer, A., Beck, R., Heald, G. et al.
  
• 2015, A&A, 574, 114
  Varenius, E., Adebahr, B., Beck, R., Dettmar, R.-J., Brüggen, M. et al.
  
• Future Observations of Cosmic Magnetic Fields with LOFAR, SKA and Its Precursors, in Magnetic Fields in Diffuse Media. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Volume 407. ISBN 978-3-662-44624-9. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2015, p. 3
  Beck, R.
  
• 2016, ApJ, 829, 133
  Kim, K.S., Lilly, S.J., Miniati, F., Bernet, M.L., Beck, R. et al.
  
• 2017, MNRAS, 463, 3143
  McKean, J.P., Beck, R., Bonafede, A., Brüggen, M. et al.