Image plane detection of FRB121102 with the MeerKAT radio telescope

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first detection of a fast radio burst (FRB) in 2-second image plane data from MeerKAT, achieving precise localization and exploring a new difference imaging technique to improve transient detection.

Contribution

The study presents the first 2-second image plane detections of FRBs with MeerKAT and introduces a novel difference imaging approach for automated transient detection.

Findings

Detected 6 out of 11 bursts in 2-s images at 1.48 GHz

Achieved 1 arcsec localization accuracy for bursts

Developed a difference imaging method to reduce candidate numbers

Abstract

We present the analysis of radio interferometric 2-s images from a MeerKAT observation of the repeating fast radio burst FRB121102 on September 2019, during which 11 distinct pulses have been previously detected using high time and frequency resolution data cubes. In this work, we detected 6 out of the 11 bursts in the image plane at 1.48 GHz with a minimum peak signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 5 {\sigma} and a fluence detection limit of 0.512 Jy ms. These constitute the first detections of a fast radio burst (FRB) or a radio transient using 2-s timescale images with MeerKAT data. Analysis of the fitted burst properties revealed a weighted average precision of 1 arcsec in the localization of the bursts. The accurate knowledge of FRB positions is essential for identifying their host galaxy and understanding their mysterious nature which is still unresolved to this day. We also produced 2-s images at 1.09 GHz but yielded no detection which we attributed to the spectral structure of the pulses that are mostly higher in strength in the upper frequencies. We also explore a new approach to difference imaging analysis (DIA) to search for transients and find that our technique has the potential to reduce the number of candidates and could be used to automate the detection of FRBs in the image plane for future MeerKAT observations.