An Injection System for the CHIME/FRB Experiment

Abstract

Dedicated surveys searching for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are subject to selection effects which bias the observed population of events. Software injection systems are one method of correcting for these biases by injecting a mock population of synthetic FRBs directly into the realtime search pipeline. The injected population may then be used to map intrinsic burst properties onto an expected signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), so long as telescope characteristics such as the beam model and calibration factors are properly accounted for. This paper presents an injection system developed for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst project (CHIME/FRB). The system was tested to ensure high detection efficiency, and the pulse calibration method was verified. Using an injection population of ~85,000 synthetic FRBs, we found that the correlation between fluence and SNR for injected FRBs was consistent with that of CHIME/FRB detections in the first CHIME/FRB catalog. We also noted that the sensitivity of the telescope varied strongly as a function of the broadened burst width, but not as a function of the dispersion measure. We conclude that some of the machine-learning based Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) mitigation methods used by CHIME/FRB can be re-trained using injection data to increase sensitivity to wide events, and that planned upgrades to the presented injection system will allow for determining a more accurate CHIME/FRB selection function in the near future.

13 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to AJ

References in corpus (9)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• A New Electron Density Model for Estimation of Pulsar and FRB Distances
• The direct localization of a fast radio burst and its host
• The Host Galaxy and Redshift of the Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102
• Observations of Fast Radio Bursts at Frequencies down to 400 Megahertz
• Inferring the Energy and Distance Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts using the First CHIME/FRB Catalog
• Using the Sun to Measure the Primary Beam Response of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment
• Estimating fast transient detection pipeline efficiencies at UTMOST via real-time injection of mock FRBs
• Four New Fast Radio Bursts Discovered in the Parkes 70-cm Pulsar Survey Archive

Cited by in corpus (13)

• CHIME/FRB Discovery of 25 Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources
• Limits on Fast Radio Burst-like Counterparts to Gamma-ray Bursts using CHIME/FRB
• Birth and Evolution of Fast Radio Bursts: Strong Population-Based Evidence for a Neutron-Star Origin
• Mitigating radio frequency interference in CHIME/FRB real-time intensity data
• The Cosmic Evolution of Fast Radio Bursts Inferred from the CHIME/FRB Baseband Catalog 1
• The Fast Radio Burst Population Energy Distribution
• Constraints on the progenitor models of fast radio bursts from population synthesis with the first CHIME/FRB catalog
• A Spatial Gap in the Sky Distribution of Fast Radio Burst Detections Coinciding with Galactic Plasma Overdensities
• TONE: A CHIME/FRB Outrigger Pathfinder for localizations of Fast Radio Bursts using Very Long Baseline Interferometry
• Exploring selection biases in FRB dispersion-galaxy cross-correlations with magnetohydrodynamical simulations
• The Northern High Time Resolution Universe pulsar survey: II. Single-pulse search set-up and simulations
• Forecasting the FRB Population Observed Through Galaxy Cluster Lenses
• Constraining the selection corrected luminosity function and total pulse count for radio transients