Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment on Giant Radio Pulses of Crab Pulsar toward Fast Radio Burst Detection

TL;DR

This study demonstrates a VLBI technique for detecting giant radio pulses from the Crab pulsar, showing improved sensitivity over single-dish methods and providing precise dispersion measure estimates relevant for fast radio burst searches.

Contribution

The paper introduces a VLBI method for detecting giant pulses from the Crab pulsar, enhancing sensitivity and accuracy in dispersion measure measurement for FRB research.

Findings

Detected 35 giant pulses with high-time-resolution VLBI.

Measured dispersion measure with high precision (56.7585 +/- 0.0025).

Confirmed VLBI sensitivity surpasses single-dish detection.

Abstract

We report on a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment on giant radio pulses (GPs) from the Crab pulsar in the radio 1.4 to 1.7 GHz range to demonstrate a VLBI technique for searching for fast radio bursts (FRBs). We carried out the experiment on 26 July 2014 using the Kashima 34 m and Usuda 64 m radio telescopes of the Japanese VLBI Network (JVN) with a baseline of about 200 km. During the approximately 1 h observation, we could detect 35 GPs by high-time-resolution VLBI. Moreover, we determined the dispersion measure (DM) to be 56.7585 +/- 0.0025 on the basis of the mean DM of the 35 GPs detected by VLBI. We confirmed that the sensitivity of a detection of GPs using our technique is superior to that of a single-dish mode detection using the same telescope.