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docs: remove statement that 21cmSense is purely map-making
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steven-murray committed Jan 31, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -13,16 +13,16 @@ authors:
- name: Jonathan Pober
equal-contrib: true # (This is how you can denote equal contributions between multiple authors)
affiliation: 2
orcid: 0000-0000-0000-0000
orcid: 0000-0002-3492-0433
- name: Matthew Kolopanis
affiliation: 3
orcid: 0000-0002-2950-2974
affiliations:
- name: Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
index: 1
- name: Brown University, USA
- name: Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
index: 2
- name: Arizona State University, USA
- name: School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
index: 3
date: 18 January 2024
bibliography: paper.bib
Expand All @@ -36,16 +36,14 @@ low-frequency radio experiments, including the MWA [@mwa], LOFAR [@lofar], HERA
and the SKA [@Pritchard2015].
21cmSense is a Python package that provides a modular framework for calculating the
sensitivity of these experiments, in order to enhance the process of their design.
This paper presents version 2 of 21cmSense, which has been re-written from the ground up
This paper presents version v2.0.0 of 21cmSense, which has been re-written from the ground up
to be more modular and extensible, and to provide a more user-friendly interface -- as
well as converting the well-used legacy package, presented in [@Pober2014] from Python 2 to 3.

21cmSense computes noise estimates under the framework of *map-making*, in which the
many baselines of an interferometer are binned into a UV grid before a Fourier Transform
over the frequency axis is performed. This is a common approach in the field, although
other approaches exist, such the delay-spectrum method [@Parsons2012].
The full sensitivity calculation in the map-making approach is rather involved and
computationally expensive in its most general form [@fhd], however 21cmSense uses a few
21cmSense can compute sensitivity estimates for both map-making [@fhd] and
delay-spectrum [@Parsons2012] approaches to power-spectrum estimation.
The full sensitivity calculation is rather involved and
computationally expensive in its most general form, however 21cmSense uses a few
key assumptions to accelerate the calculation:

1. The UV grid is chosen to have cells that are comparable to the instrument's beam size.
Expand All @@ -56,11 +54,6 @@ key assumptions to accelerate the calculation:
2. We do not consider flagging of visibilities due to RFI and other systematics, which
can complicate the propagation of uncertainties.

Beyond these assumptions, there is also the current limitation that 21cmSense computes
the sensitivity under the map-making framework. Nevertheless, the modularity included
in this new version provides a path forward to include delay-spectrum calculations in
the future.

Some of the key new features introduced in this version of 21cmSense include:

1. Simplified, modular library API: the calculation has been split into modules that can
Expand All @@ -76,7 +69,7 @@ Some of the key new features introduced in this version of 21cmSense include:
5. Generalization of the sensitivity calculation. The `Sensitivity` class is an abstract
class from which the sensitivity of differing summary statistics can be defined.
Currently, its only implementation is the `PowerSpectrum` class, which computes the
classic sensitivity of the (map-making style) power spectrum. However, the framework
classic sensitivity of the power spectrum. However, the framework
can be extended to other summaries, for example wavelets [@Trott2016a].
6. Improved speed: the new version of 21cmSense is significantly faster than the legacy
version, due to a number of vectorization improvements in the code.
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