The Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) pulsar survey -- I. Survey design and processing pipeline

Abstract

We present an overview of the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) pulsar survey that exploits the MWA's large field of view and voltage capture system to survey the sky south of 30 degree in declination for pulsars and fast transients in the 140-170 MHz band. The survey is enabled by the advent of the Phase II MWA's compact configuration, which offers an enormous efficiency in beam-forming and processing costs, thereby making an all-sky survey of this magnitude tractable with the MWA. Even with the long dwell times of the survey (4800 s), data collection can be completed in < 100 hours of telescope time, while still retaining the ability to reach a limiting sensitivity of ~2-3 mJy. Each observation is processed to generate ~5000-8000 tied-array beams that tessellate the full ~610 square degree field of view, which are then processed to search for pulsars. The voltage-capture recording allows a multitude of post hoc processing options including the reprocessing of data for higher time resolution. Due to the substantial computational cost in pulsar searches at low frequencies, processing is undertaken in multiple passes: in the first pass, a shallow survey is performed, where 10 minutes of each observation is processed, reaching about one-third of the full search sensitivity. Here we present the system overview and initial results. Further details including first pulsar discoveries and a census of low-frequency detections are presented in a companion paper. Future plans include deeper searches to reach the full sensitivity and acceleration searches to target binary and millisecond pulsars. Simulation analysis forecasts ~300 new pulsars upon the completion of full processing. The SMART survey will also generate a complete digital record of the low-frequency sky, which will serve as a valuable reference for future pulsar searches planned with the low-frequency Square Kilometre Array.

arXiv comment22 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, Accepted for publication in PASA

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: VI. The discovery of 473 new pulsars
• Pushchino multibeams pulsar search. IV. Detection of new pulsars at declinations -9o < δ< +55o
• PSR J0026-1955: A curious case of evolutionary subpulse drifting and nulling
• Discovery and follow-up of a quasiperiodically nulling and sub-pulse drifting pulsar with the Murchison Widefield Array
• The Huge Magnetic Toroids in the Milky Way Halo
• Single-pulse analysis and average emission characteristics of PSR J1820-0427 from observations made with the MWA and uGMRT
• Illuminating Hidden Pulsars: Scintillation-Enhanced Discovery of Two Binary Millisecond Pulsars in M13 with FAST
• BLINK: an End-To-End GPU High Time Resolution Imaging Pipeline for Fast Radio Burst Searches with the Murchison Widefield Array