A search for highly dispersed fast radio bursts in three Parkes multibeam surveys

Abstract

We have searched three Parkes multibeam 1.4 GHz surveys for the presence of fast radio bursts (FRBs) out to a dispersion measure (DM) of 5000 pc cm-3. These surveys originally targeted the Magellanic Clouds (in two cases) and unidentified gamma-ray sources at mid-Galactic latitudes (in the third case) for new radio pulsars. In previous processing, none of these surveys were searched to such a high DM limit. The surveys had a combined total of 719 h of Parkes multibeam on-sky time. One known FRB, 010724, was present in our data and was detected in our analysis but no new FRBs were found. After adding in the on-sky Parkes time from these three surveys to the on-sky time (7512 h) from the five Parkes surveys analysed by Rane et al., all of which have now been searched to high DM limits, we improve the constraint on the all-sky rate of FRBs above a fluence level of 3.8 Jy ms at 1.4 GHz to R = 3.3+3.7-2.2 × 103 events per day per sky (at the 99 per cent confidence level). Future Parkes surveys that accumulate additional multibeam on-sky time (such as the ongoing high-resolution Parkes survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud) can be combined with these results to further constrain the all-sky FRB rate.