CHIME FRB: An application of FFT beamforming for a radio telescope

Abstract

We have developed FFT beamforming techniques for the CHIME radio telescope, to search for and localize the astrophysical signals from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) over a large instantaneous field-of-view (FOV) while maintaining the full angular resolution of CHIME. We implement a hybrid beamforming pipeline in a GPU correlator, synthesizing 256 FFT-formed beams in the North-South direction by four formed beams along East-West via exact phasing, tiling a sky area of ~250 square degrees. A zero-padding approximation is employed to improve chromatic beam alignment across the wide bandwidth of 400 to 800 MHz. We up-channelize the data in order to achieve fine spectral resolution of $\Delta \nu$=24 kHz and time cadence of 0.983 ms, desirable for detecting transient and dispersed signals such as those from FRBs.

4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to the XXXII International Union of Radio Science General Assembly & Scientific Symposium (URSI GASS) 2017

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• The Fast Fourier Transform Telescope
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• An analysis pipeline for CHIME/FRB full-array baseband data
• A Synoptic VLBI Technique for Localizing Non-Repeating Fast Radio Bursts with CHIME/FRB
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• Contemporaneous X-ray Observations of 30 Bright Radio Bursts from the Prolific Fast Radio Burst Source FRB 20220912A
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• TONE: A CHIME/FRB Outrigger Pathfinder for localizations of Fast Radio Bursts using Very Long Baseline Interferometry
• Gamma-ray and Optical Observations of Repeating Fast Radio Bursts with VERITAS
• An Overview of CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment