1211.1338 (J. Von Korff et al.)

Astropulse: A Search for Microsecond Transient Radio Signals Using Distributed Computing. I. Methodology    [PDF]

J. Von Korff, P. Demorest, E. Heien, E. Korpela, D. Werthimer, J. Cobb, M. Lebofsky, D. Anderson, B. Bankay, A. Siemion

We are performing a transient, microsecond timescale radio sky survey, called "Astropulse," using the Arecibo telescope. Astropulse searches for brief (0.4 {\mu}s to 204.8 {\mu}s), wideband (relative to its 2.5 MHz bandwidth) radio pulses centered at 1,420 MHz. Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and scans the sky between declinations of -1.33 and 38.03 degrees. We obtained 1,540 hours of data in each of 7 beams of the ALFA receiver, with 2 polarizations per beam. Examination of timescales on the order of a few microseconds is possible because we used coherent dedispersion. The more usual technique, incoherent dedispersion, cannot resolve signals below a minimum timescale. 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.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1338