FAST Drift Scan Survey for H <scp>i</scp> Intensity Mapping. II. Stacking-based Beam Construction of the 19-feed Array at 1.4 GHz

Abstract Neutral hydrogen (H i ) intensity mapping (IM) presents great promise for future cosmological large-scale structure surveys. However, a major challenge for H i IM cosmological studies is to accurately subtract the foreground contamination. An accurate beam model is crucial for improving the quality of foreground subtraction. In this work, we develop a stacking-based beam reconstruction method utilizing the radio continuum point sources within the drift-scan field. Based on the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), we employ two sets of drift-scan survey data and merge the measurements to construct the beam patterns of the 19 FAST L -band feeds. To model the beams, we utilize the Zernike polynomial, which effectively captures asymmetric features of the main beam and the different side lobes. Due to the symmetric location of the beams, the main features of the beams are closely related to the distance from the center of the feed array, e.g., as the distance increases, side lobes become more pronounced. This modeling pipeline leverages the stable drift-scan data to extract beam patterns while accounting for and excluding the reflector’s changing effects. It provides a more accurate measurement beam and a more precise model beam for FAST H i IM cosmology surveys.