Astropulse: A Search for Microsecond Transient Radio Signals Using Distributed Computing. I. Methodology

Abstract

We are performing a transient, microsecond timescale radio sky survey, called "Astropulse," using the Arecibo telescope. Astropulse searches for brief (0.4 μs to 204.8 μs), wideband (relative to its 2.5 MHz bandwidth) radio pulses centered at 1,420 MHz. Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and scans the sky between declinations of -1.33 and 38.03 degrees. We obtained 1,540 hours of data in each of 7 beams of the ALFA receiver, with 2 polarizations per beam. Examination of timescales on the order of a few microseconds is possible because we used coherent dedispersion. The more usual technique, incoherent dedispersion, cannot resolve signals below a minimum timescale. However, coherent dedispersion requires more intensive computation than incoherent dedispersion. The required processing power was provided by BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.

42 pages, 2 figures, Accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA: Probing Radio Pulsar Intermittency and Transients
• First results from the Arecibo Galactic HI Survey: the disk/halo interface region in the outer Galaxy
• Statistical properties of giant pulses from the Crab pulsar

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