Detection of fast radio transients with multiple stations: a case study using the Very Long Baseline Array

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a real-time, multi-station approach for detecting fast radio transients, improving sensitivity and interference excision using the VLBA, with implications for future large-scale radio arrays.

Contribution

It introduces algorithms for simultaneous interference excision and transient detection across multiple stations, validated with VLBA data, enhancing detection sensitivity for fast radio bursts.

Findings

Multi-station algorithms improved pulse detection sensitivity.

Real-time system successfully identified pulsar signals amidst interference.

Strategies are applicable to future large-scale radio arrays.

Abstract

Recent investigations reveal an important new class of transient radio phenomena that occur on sub-millisecond timescales. Often transient surveys' data volumes are too large to archive exhaustively. Instead, an on-line automatic system must excise impulsive interference and detect candidate events in real-time. This work presents a case study using data from multiple geographically distributed stations to perform simultaneous interference excision and transient detection. We present several algorithms that incorporate dedispersed data from multiple sites, and report experiments with a commensal real-time transient detection system on the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). We test the system using observations of pulsar B0329+54. The multiple-station algorithms enhanced sensitivity for detection of individual pulses. These strategies could improve detection performance for a future generation of geographically distributed arrays such as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder and the Square Kilometre Array.