Towards the development of a high-sensitivity cryogenic phased array feed

A cryogenic phased array feed operating at L-band is in development for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The feed consists of electrically small feed elements optimized for active impedance matching to cooled front end low noise amplifiers (LNAs), down-converters, a real-time streaming data acquisition system, and beamforming algorithms applied in post-processing. A prototype cryogenic array feed was recently tested on the GBT. This results will be an important step towards the development of a new receiver instrument, the focal L-band array for the GBT (FLAG).