A Fast Transient Backend to Detect FRBs with the Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array

TL;DR

This paper presents a new millisecond-response digital backend for the Tianlai Dish Pathfinder array, enabling real-time detection and classification of fast radio bursts (FRBs) with improved temporal resolution.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel digital backend with millisecond response time and a real-time search pipeline for FRBs, enhancing the array's capability for fast transient detection.

Findings

Successfully captured pulsar signals in commissioning

Formed 16 digital beams covering 19.6 square degrees

Enabled real-time FRB detection and classification

Abstract

The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder array is a radio interferometer array consisting of 16 six meter dish antennas. The original digital backend integration time is at the seconds level, designed for HI intensity mapping experiment. A new digital backend with millisecond response is added to enable it to search for fast radio burst (FRB) during its observations. The design and calibration of this backend, and the real time search pipeline for it are described in this paper. It is capable of forming 16 digital beams for each linear polarisation, covering an area of 19.6 square degrees. The search pipeline is capable of searching for, recording and classifying FRBs automatically in real time. In commissioning, we succeeded in capturing the signal pulses from the pulsars PSR B0329+54 and B2021+51.