The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview

By T. C. C. M. Amiri, K. Bandura, Philippe Berger, M. Bhardwaj, M. Boyce, P. Boyle, C. Brar, M. Burhanpurkar, P. Chawla, J. Chowdhury and 41 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a novel transit radio telescope operating across the 400–800 MHz band. CHIME is composed of four 20 m × 100 m semicylindrical paraboloid reflectors, each of which has 256 dual-polarization feeds suspended along its axis, giving it a ≳200 deg2 field of view. This, combined with wide bandwidth, high sensitivity, and a powerful correlator, makes CHIME an excellent instrument for the detection of fast radio bursts (FRBs). The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) will search beam-formed, high time and frequency resolution data in real time for FRBs in the CHIME field of view. Here we describe the CHIME/FRB back end, including the real-time FRB search and detection software pipeline, as well as the planned offline analyses. We estimate a CHIME/FRB detection rate of 2–42 FRBs sky–1 day–1 normalizing to the rate estimated at 1.4 GHz by Vander Wiel et al. Likely science outcomes of CHIME/FRB are also discussed. CHIME/FRB is currently operational in a commissioning phase, with science operations expected to commence in the latter half of 2018.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9555d937249a138dde3f95aa709c98524be167aa