Status of the UC-Berkeley SETI Efforts

TL;DR

This paper reviews various SETI programs at UC Berkeley, including optical and radio searches, data analysis efforts, and recent reobservations, highlighting technological capabilities and ongoing research in detecting extraterrestrial signals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of UC Berkeley's current SETI initiatives, detailing new methods, data analysis techniques, and recent observational results.

Findings

Detection of microsecond pulses in reobserved sky locations

Implementation of autocorrelation analysis in SETI@home

Ongoing data collection at Arecibo and GBT

Abstract

We summarize radio and optical SETI programs based at the University of California, Berkeley. The SEVENDIP optical pulse search looks for ns time scale pulses at visible wavelengths using an automated 30 inch telescope. The ongoing SERENDIP V.v sky survey searches for radio signals at the 300 meter Arecibo Observatory. The currently installed configuration supports 128 million channels over a 200 MHz bandwidth with ~1.6 Hz spectral resolution. SETI@home uses the desktop computers of volunteers to analyze over 160 TB of data at taken at Arecibo looking for two types of continuous wave signals and two types of pulsed signals. A version to be released this summer adds autocorrelation analysis to look for complex wave forms that have been repeated (and overlayed) after a short delay. SETI@home will soon be processing data of Kepler exoplanet systems collected at the GBT. The Astropulse project is the first SETI search for $\mu$s time scale dispersed pulses in the radio spectrum. We recently reobserved 114 sky locations where microsecond pulses were detected. This data is in process of being transferred to Berkeley for analysis.