It has been proposed recently that the SKA1-MID could be used to conduct an HI intensity mapping survey that could rival upcoming Stage IV dark energy surveys. However, measuring the weak HI signal is expected to be very challenging due to contaminations such as residual Galactic emission, RFI, and instrumental 1/f noise. Modelling the effects of these contaminants on the cosmological HI signal requires numerical end-to-end simulations. Here we present how 1/f noise within the receiver can double the effective uncertainty of an SKA-like survey to HI on large angular scales (l < 50).
Comment: Draft proceedings for the conference Rencontres de Moriond 2016 on cosmology. 4 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables