Beam Patterns of the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope: Optimisation

Abstract: The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) uses adaptive spherical panels to achieve a huge collecting area for radio waves. In this paper, we try to explore the optimal parameters for the curvature radius of spherical panels and the focal distance by comparison of the calculated beam patterns. We show that to get the best beam shape and maximum gain, the optimal curvature radius of panels is around 300 m, and a small shift in the focal distance of a few cm is needed. The aperture efficiency can be improved by ~10% at 3 GHz by this small shift. We also try to optimise the panel positioning for the best beam, and find that panel shifts of a few mm can improve the beam pattern by a similar extent. Our results indicate that accurate control of the feed and panel positions to the mm level is very crucial for the stability of FAST's observational performance.