A Needle in a Cosmic Haystack: A Review of FRB Search Techniques

TL;DR

This review paper discusses the evolution, current techniques, and future prospects of Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search software pipelines, emphasizing real-time detection, localization, and multi-wavelength follow-up in the era of big data astronomy.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of FRB search techniques, including traditional methods, recent innovations, and proposed future approaches for large-scale data analysis.

Findings

Detection software now operates in real-time within seconds.

Techniques adapted from pulsar searches are widely used.

Future methodologies aim to handle big data challenges in FRB detection.

Abstract

Ephemeral Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) must be powered by some of the most energetic processes in the Universe. That makes them highly interesting in their own right and as precise probes for estimating cosmological parameters. This field thus poses a unique challenge: FRBs must be detected promptly and immediately localised and studied based only on that single millisecond-duration flash. The problem is that the burst occurrence is highly unpredictable and that their distance strongly suppresses their brightness. Since the discovery of FRBs in single-dish archival data in 2007, detection software has evolved tremendously. Pipelines now detect bursts in real-time within a matter of seconds, operate on interferometers, buffer high-time and frequency resolution data, and issue real-time alerts to other observatories for rapid multi-wavelength follow-up. In this paper, we review the components that comprise a FRB search software pipeline, we discuss the proven techniques that were adopted from pulsar searches, we highlight newer, more efficient techniques for detecting FRBs, and we conclude by discussing the proposed novel future methodologies that may power the search for FRBs in the era of big data astronomy.