Unveiling Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionisation with HERA

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The aim of this project is to contribute to the development and application of advanced statistical methods to the analysis of existing and future data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). Key problems include: Efficiently and precisely estimating the power spectrum of 21cm fluctuations, in the presence of bright foreground emission. Correcting for "leakage" due to cuts in the data, imposed by excising radio frequency interference. Analysing the stability of the results to various analysis assumptions, by rigorously applying null tests and feeding simulated data through the analysis pipeline. Accurately estimating the covariance matrix of the data, which is needed to optimally extract the faint 21cm signal. Modelling/simulating the physical EoR and Cosmic Dawn signal in a computationally-efficient way.Some of this work will be carried out in collaboration with other members of the HERA Collaboration based in Berkeley, McGill, U. Western Cape, JPL, U. Penn, and U. Washington. The student will gain skills in analysis and interpretation of radio astronomical data, the application of high-dimensional inference techniques to large volumes of data, the application of structured and unsupervised machine learning techniques to detect spurious features in data, and the development of fast parallel data analysis codes to be run on high-performance computers.