Invariants in Co-polar Interferometry: an Abelian Gauge Theory

Abstract

An $N$-element interferometer measures correlations among pairs of array elements. Closure invariants associated with closed loops among array elements are immune to multiplicative, element-based ("local") corruptions that occur in these measurements. Till recently, it has been unclear how a complete set of independent invariants can be analytically determined. We view the local, element-based corruptions in co-polar correlations as gauge tranformations belonging to the gauge group $\textrm{GL}(1,\mathbb{C})$. Closure quantities are then naturally gauge invariant. We use this to provide a simple and effective formalism, and identify the complete set of independent closure invariants from co-polar interferometric correlations using only quantities defined on $(N-1)(N-2)/2$ elementary and independent triangular loops. The $(N-1)(N-2)/2$ closure phases and $N(N-3)/2$ closure amplitudes (totaling $N^2-3N+1$ real invariants), familiar in astronomical interferometry, naturally emerge from this formalism, which unifies what has required separate treatments until now. We do not require auto-correlations, but can easily include them if reliably measured. This unified view clarifies issues relating to noise and inference of object model parameters. It also allows us to extend the rule of parallel transport associated with Pancharatnam phase in optics to apply to amplitudes as well. The framework presented here extends to $\textrm{GL}(2,\mathbb{C}$) for full polarimetric interferometry as presented in a companion paper, which generalizes and clarifies earlier work. Our findings are relevant to state of the art co-polar and full polarimetric very long baseline interferometry measurements to determine features very near the event horizons of blackholes at the centers of M87, Centaurus~A, and the Milky Way.