A highly-sensitive cryogenic phased array feed for the Green Bank Telescope

In this paper, we describe the development of a new L-band (1.4 GHz) Cryogenic Phased Array Feed (PAF) system, referred to as the GBT2 array. Results from initial measurements made with the GBT2 array are also presented. The PAF was developed for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) as part of the Focal L-band Array for the GBT (FLAG) project. During the first stage of the development work (Phase I), a prototype cryogenic 19 element dual-polarized array with “Kite” dipole elements was developed and tested on the GBT. The measured system temperature over efficiency (Tsys/ η) ratio for the bore sight beam of the Kite array was 45.5 K at 1.55 GHz. The off-boresight 7S
ys
/η shows an increase by 13 K at an offset equal to the half power beam width (7.2 at 1.7 GHz). Our measurements indicate that the off-boresight degradation and field-of-view (FoV) limitation of the Kite array is simply due to the fixed array size. To increase the FoV, a new 19-element GBT2 array with larger array spacing was developed during FLAG Phase II. The frequency response of the array was optimized from 1.2 to 1.6 GHz. A system with larger cryostat, new low noise amplifiers (LNAs), down-conversion and digitization close to the front end, unformatted digital transmission over fiber, ROACH II based polyphase filter banks (PFBs) with bandwidth 150 MHz and a data acquisition system that records voltage samples from one of the PFB channels were all developed. The data presented here is processed off-line. The receiver temperature measured (off the telescope, on cold sky/hot load, with no beamforming) with the new system is 17 K at 1.4 GHz, an improvement > 8 K over the previous Kite array. Measurements with the GBT2 array on the telescope are in progress. A real time 150 MHz beam-former is also being developed as part of an NSF-funded collaboration between NRAO/GBO/BYU & West Virginia University (Beamformer Project) to support science observations.