| Authors : | Sujay Mate, TIFR, Mumbai, India;
Shriharsh Tendulkar, TIFR, Mumbai, India;
Arvind Balasubramanian, TIFR, Mumbai, India;
Yash Bhusare, NCRA-TIFR, Pune, India;
Kevin Luke, St. Xavier's Autonomous, Mumbai, India;
Ziggy Pleunis, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy, University of Toronto, Canada;
Paul Scholz, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy, University of Toronto, Canada; |
| Abstract : | The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit radio telescope operating across 400 - 800 MHz with a field of view of ~ 200 sq. degrees. The telescope has been regularly detecting Fast Radio Bursts using the CHIME/FRB system. The sensitivity of CHIME/FRB reduces with larger pulse widths due to the current design of its radio frequency interference (RFI) removal algorithms, making it challenging to detect bursts with widths > 50 ms. Hence, slower duration transients are an as-yet unexplored and open parameter space. Possible sources for such radio transients could include flaring stars, compact binaries, radio counterparts of binary neutron star mergers or GRBs. Here we present our transient search pipeline developed to detect slower duration radio transients (50 ms - 5 seconds) in the CHIME data. The pipeline makes use of well-established softwares such as IQRM, PRESTO and FETCH for RFI cleaning, single-pulse search and event classification respectively. The novel setup is designed from inception to have a built-in system to inject simulated pulses (sampled across DM, fluence and pulse width parameter space) in the real data and recover them using the pipeline. The statistics from the injection system are used to optimise the detection efficiency of the RFI removal algorithm, measure the false alarm rate, and measure the detection completeness of the pipeline. The pipeline will be deployed to detect slow radio transients in the data gathered for the CHIME Slow Pulsar Search project. |
