CHIME FRB: An application of FFT beamforming for a radio telescope [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04728


We have developed FFT beamforming techniques for the CHIME radio telescope, to search for and localize the astrophysical signals from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) over a large instantaneous field-of-view (FOV) while maintaining the full angular resolution of CHIME. We implement a hybrid beamforming pipeline in a GPU correlator, synthesizing 256 FFT-formed beams in the North-South direction by four formed beams along East-West via exact phasing, tiling a sky area of ~250 square degrees. A zero-padding approximation is employed to improve chromatic beam alignment across the wide bandwidth of 400 to 800 MHz. We up-channelize the data in order to achieve fine spectral resolution of $\Delta\nu$=24 kHz and time cadence of 0.983 ms, desirable for detecting transient and dispersed signals such as those from FRBs.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Ng, K. Vanderlinde, A. Paradise, et. al.
Fri, 17 Feb 17
40/43

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to the XXXII International Union of Radio Science General Assembly & Scientific Symposium (URSI GASS) 2017