Search, analysis and localization of FRBs

Wednesday 25 Aug 2021 @ 10:00 a.m., Zoom
Kshitij Aggarwal, West Virginia University; Email: ka0064[at]mix.wvu.edu

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, transient sources of extragalactic origin. In this talk, I will describe an end-to-end search and analysis software suite to study FRBs. All of these tools are python-based, user-friendly, robust, and have been tested rigorously. I will start with Your (Your Unified Reader) that unifies the data ingestion across multiple data formats and can also be used to do RFI mitigation, single-pulse search, visualization, etc. To classify the candidates generated from the search, we have developed Fetch, a state-of-the-art deep learning-based classifier, that has already been used to discover many FRBs. To analyze the FRBs, we developed Burstfit, which provides a framework to model any spectrogram consisting of an FRB using multiple robust methods. I will then talk about localizing FRBs using Realfast system at the Very Large Array, and some recent results from this system.