The PALFA Survey: Going to great depths to find radio pulsars

Lazarus, P.; Allen, B.; Bhat, N. D. R.; Bogdanov, Slavko; Bouchard, Antoine; Brazier, A.; Camilo, F.; Cardoso, F.; Chatterjee, Shami; Cordes, J. M.; Crawford, F.; Deneva, J. S.; Desvignes, G.; Freire, P. C. C.; Hessels, J. W. T.; Jenet, Fredrick; Kaspi, V. M.; Knispel, Benjamin; Leeuwen, J. van; Lorimer, D. R.; Lynch, R.; Lyne, A. G.; McLaughlin, Maura; Nice, D. J.; Ransom, Scott M.; Scholz, Paul; Siemens, X.; Stairs, I. H.; Stappers, B. W.; Stovall, K.; Swiggum, Joseph K.

doi:10.1017/s1743921312023101

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The GBNCC survey is about a factor of 2.5 more sensitive to low-DM pulsars in high Galactic latitude regions than the ongoing High Time Resolution Universe (HTRU) surveys being performed with Parkes and Effelsberg (Keith et al 2010), is significantly more sensitive to MSPs than past Arecibo surveys, and has comparable sensitivity for MSPs to the ongoing Arecibo Drift 327 MHz survey (AO327), which covers the declination range 0 • > δ > 38 • . We have not compared our sensitivity to Galactic plane surveys, such as the Pulsar Arecibo L-Band Feed Array (PALFA) survey (Cordes et al 2006;Lazarus 2013), the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey (PMPS) , and the HTRU mid and low latitude surveys (Keith et al 2010) as these searches focus on low Galactic latitudes, where we are not as sensitive due to higher T sky , dispersive smearing, and scattering -all of which are much larger effects in our frequency range.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey. I. Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results

Stovall

Lynch

Ransom

et al. 2014

ApJ

228

129

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We describe an ongoing search for pulsars and dispersed pulses of radio emission, such as those from rotating radio transients (RRATs) and fast radio bursts (FRBs), at 350 MHz using the Green Bank Telescope. With the Green Bank Ultimate Pulsar Processing Instrument, we record 100 MHz of bandwidth divided into 4,096 channels every 81.92 µs. This survey will cover the entire sky visible to the Green Bank Telescope (δ > −40 • , or 82% of the sky) and outside of the Galactic Plane will be sensitive enough to detect slow pulsars and low dispersion measure (<30 pc cm −3 ) millisecond pulsars (MSPs) with a 0.08 duty cycle down to 1.1 mJy. For pulsars with a spectral index of −1.6, we will be 2.5 times more sensitive than previous and ongoing surveys over much of our survey region. Here we describe the survey, the data analysis pipeline, initial discovery parameters for 62 pulsars, and timing solutions for 5 new pulsars. PSR J0214+5222 is an MSP in a long-period (512 days) orbit and has an optical counterpart identified in archival data. PSR J0636+5129 is an MSP in a very shortperiod (96 minutes) orbit with a very low mass companion (8 M J ). PSR J0645+5158 is an isolated MSP with a timing residual RMS of 500 ns and has been added to pulsar timing array experiments. PSR J1434+7257 is an isolated, intermediate-period pulsar that has been partially recycled. PSR J1816+4510 is an eclipsing MSP in a short-period orbit (8.7 hours) and may have recently completed its spin-up phase.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey. I. Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results

Stovall

Lynch

Ransom

et al. 2014

ApJ

228

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…describes the imbalance between pulsar and non-pulsar candidates in generated data. The ratio observed during real pulsar searches varies from 1:7,500 [46,84] to 1:33,000 [24,52,1]. For the prototype, we maintain ratios of up to 1:10,000 (0.0001).…”

Section: Sp Spoutsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A processing pipeline for high volume pulsar candidate data streams

Lyon

Stappers

Levin

et al. 2019

Astronomy and Computing

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Pulsar data analysis pipelines have historically been comprised of bespoke software systems, supporting the off-line analysis of data. However modern data acquisition systems are making off-line analyses impractical. They often output multiple simultaneous high volume data streams, significantly increasing data capture rates. This leads to the accumulation of large data volumes, which are prohibitively expensive to retain. To maintain processing capabilities when off-line analysis becomes infeasible due to cost, requires a shift to on-line data processing. This paper makes four contributions facilitating this shift with respect to the search for radio pulsars: i) it characterises for the modern era, the key components of a pulsar search science (not signal processing) pipeline, ii) it examines the feasibility of implementing on-line pulsar search via existing tools, iii) problems preventing an easy transition to on-line search are identified and explained, and finally iv) it provides the design for a new prototype pipeline capable of overcoming such problems. Realised using Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components, the deployable system is open source, simple, scalable, and cheap to produce. It has the potential to achieve pulsar search design requirements for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), illustrated via testing under simulated SKA loads. streams (i.e. 'tuple-at-a-time' or 'click-stream'). This represents an advancement over the current state-of-the-art, and a departure from traditional off-line batch methods.

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“…The highest DM/P a survey finds has previously been put forward as a measure of survey depth (e.g. Lazarus 2013), which in the case of MSPs is limited by so-called DM smearing: the artificial pulse widening caused by the uncorrected dispersion delay ∆t within a single frequency channel, given by…”

Section: No Namementioning

confidence: 99%

The High Time Resolution Universe survey – XIV. Discovery of 23 pulsars through GPU-accelerated reprocessing

Morello

Barr

Cooper

et al. 2018

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We have performed a new search for radio pulsars in archival data of the intermediate and high Galactic latitude parts of the Southern High Time Resolution Universe pulsar survey. This is the first time the entire dataset has been searched for binary pulsars, an achievement enabled by GPU-accelerated dedispersion and periodicity search codes nearly 50 times faster than the previously used pipeline. Candidate selection was handled entirely by a Machine Learning algorithm, allowing for the assessment of 17.6 million candidates in a few person-days. We have also introduced an outlier detection algorithm for efficient radio-frequency interference (RFI) mitigation on folded data, a new approach that enabled the discovery of pulsars previously masked by RFI. We discuss implications for future searches, particularly the importance of expanding work on RFI mitigation to improve survey completeness. In total we discovered 23 previously unknown sources, including 6 millisecond pulsars and at least 4 pulsars in binary systems. We also found an elusive but credible redback candidate that we have yet to confirm.

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The PALFA Survey: Going to great depths to find radio pulsars

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey. I. Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results

The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey. I. Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results

A processing pipeline for high volume pulsar candidate data streams

The High Time Resolution Universe survey – XIV. Discovery of 23 pulsars through GPU-accelerated reprocessing

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