The CHIME/FRB Outriggers: Commissioning the Hat Creek Outrigger and an Updated Calibration Scheme for Mitigating RFI

Abstract: This work presents commissioning of the Hat Creek Outrigger (HCO), a dual-polarization 256-element radio interferometer that is part of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB) Outrigger project. Driven by a complex radio-frequency interference (RFI) environment that consistently contaminates $\sim40\%$ of HCO's usable bandwidth, we implement an improved calibration scheme using Gaussian Process Regression to recover complex gain solutions over RFI contaminated channels. To validate our method, we test the performance of the array using known transients and continuum sources over relevant timescales used for fast-transient research ($\lesssim$ seconds). We find that our updated calibration scheme results in a $\sim1.69\times~\mathrm{to}~1.87\times$ improvement in the array's point-source sensitivity, while simultaneously maintaining noise properties consistent with thermal statistics. As a result, we find that the array performs consistently within theoretical expectations across $\gtrsim80\%$ of HCO's bandpass. We further observe an improvement in the interferometric performance after applying recently developed spatial filtering techniques for RFI mitigation, which rely on accurate calibration solutions for effective removal of unwanted interference. We conclude that our approach provides a valid framework for improving calibration solutions over RFI contaminated channels for large-$N$ interferometric arrays more broadly. Our work motivates future development of more sophisticated techniques to recover astrophysical information in RFI-contaminated channels, departing from the historical practice of discarding them outright.