Download or read book A Single Pulse Pipeline for the Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array Survey written by Chitrang Patel and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "PALFA (Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array) is an on-going survey of the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz, searching for radio pulsars (rapidly rotating highly magnetized neutron stars) with the Arecibo 305-m single dish radio telescope located in Puerto Rico. Begun in 2004, PALFA has discovered 163 radio pulsars including 13 RRATs (Rotating RAdio Transients -- a recently discovered class of pulsars with sporadic emission) and 1 FRB (Fast Radio Bursts -- a mysterious new class of milliseconds duration bright radio bursts). We have written and implemented a new data analysis pipeline to improve the search for long period pulsars (spin period P > 0.1 s), RRATs and FRBs. The new pipeline is an improvement to the original data analysis pipeline with a more systematic processing and post-processing approach to identify astrophysical individually detectable single pulses in the time domain. The original pipeline consisted of a matched-filtering search technique as a part of the single pulse analysis of the pipeline. To do a more rigorous search, we appended the pipeline with a grouping algorithm which gathers similar single pulse events into a single group based on proximity in time and DM (dispersion measure -- the integrated column density of free electrons along a particular line of sight). Each group is ranked based on the criteria that astrophysical pulses follow (their signal-to-noise peaks at the optimal DM and falls off on either sides). A final candidate diagnostic plot is produced for each potential astrophysical candidate as identified by the grouping algorithm. Each candidate is then subject to a series of heuristic ratings followed by evaluation by a machine-learning algorithm. The final candidate diagnostic plots are uploaded to an online candidate viewer for by-eye inspection by the members of the PALFA consortium. Using this new pipeline we have discovered 5 new pulsars and 2 RRATs, 3 of which were detected uniquely by the single pulse analysis of the pipeline and 4 were detected by both single pulse and periodicity analysis. The discovered pulsars are now being regularly monitored as a part of our timing campaign. We plan to reprocess all PALFA archival data in Summer 2016 using this newly developed single-pulse pipeline. In doing so, we expect to find at least 9 new pulsars (including RRATs and FRBs) that could have been missed by the original pipeline." --