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 1420 MHz. Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and scans the sky between declinations of -1.°33 and 38.°03. We obtained 1540 hr of data in each of seven beams of the ALFA receiver, with two polarizations per beam. The data are one-bit complex sampled at the Nyquist limit of 0.4 μs per sample. Examination of timescales on the order of microseconds is possible because we used coherent dedispersion, a technique that has frequently been used for targeted observations, but has never been associated with a radio sky survey. The more usual technique, incoherent dedispersion, cannot resolve signals below a minimum timescale which depends on the signal's dispersion measure (DM) and frequency. 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. BOINC is a distributed computing system, allowing us to utilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers' computers to perform the necessary calculations for coherent dedispersion. Astrophysical events that might produce brief radio pulses include giant pulses from pulsars, rotating radio transients, exploding primordial black holes, or new sources yet to be imagined. Radio frequency interference and noise contaminate the data; these are mitigated by a number of techniques including multi-polarization correlation, DM repetition detection, and frequency profiling. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.