Title: Building an FFT Correlator for the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array

Speaker: Deepthi Gorthi, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract: A correlator is the electronic backend of a radio interferometer that cross-correlates pairs of antennas, eventually to build an image of the sky. During this talk, I will try to argue that this is mathematically equivalent to computing a Fourier transform of the array sometimes (and what that means) and present a new design for correlators that will make them faster and cheaper to build. I will also talk about the challenges involved in building the instrument, the arrays it will be most useful for and what that means for the future of low frequency radio astronomy.