Fast radio bursts: search sensitivities and completeness

TL;DR

This paper identifies inefficiencies in FRB search algorithms, recalculates key parameters for known FRBs, discusses factors affecting population estimates, and provides accessible data and analysis tools.

Contribution

It highlights sub-optimal search performance, corrects previous FRB measurements, introduces new completeness factors, and offers open data and software for the community.

Findings

Search algorithms can reduce the probed cosmological volume by over 20%.

Some previously reported FRB flux densities are underestimated, e.g., FRB 010125.

The all-sky FRB rate above 2 Jy ms is approximately 2500 per day.

Abstract

In this paper we identify some sub-optimal performance in algorithms that search for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which can reduce the cosmological volume probed by over 20%, and result in missed discoveries and incorrect flux density and sky rate determinations. Re-calculating parameters for all of the FRBs discovered with the Parkes telescope (i.e. all of the reported FRBs bar one), we find some inconsistencies with previously determined values, e.g. FRB 010125 was approximately twice as bright as previously reported. We describe some incompleteness factors not previously considered which are important in determining accurate population statistics, e.g. accounting for fluence incompleteness the Thornton et al. all-sky rate can be re-phrased as ~2500 FRBs per sky per day above a 1.4-GHz fluence of ~2 Jy ms. Finally we make data for the FRBs easily available, along with software to analyse these.