Present:

• Ramesh Bhat
• Sammy McSweeney
• Nick Swainston
• Susmita Sett
• Willem van Straten
• Shi Dai
• Ryan Shannon
• Mengyao Xue
• Marcin Sokolowski
• Gayatri Aniruddha
• Ian Morrison
• Zhongli Zhang

Agenda:

1. General updates (Ramesh)
2. MWAX VCS update (Sammy)
3. Database migration (Nick)
4. Papers and proposals  (Sammy/Ramesh)
5. ML integration plans (Sammy/Isaac)
6. Any other discussion (all)

Minutes:

• Introductions:
• Welcome to Gayatri, joining the PaCER team – looking for FRBs in MWA high time resolution images
• Ramesh’s initial update
• SMART Survey update
• Pulsar #3!
• Remaining observing campaign still at the mercy of MWA commissioning timeline
• During MWA Project Meeting, needs of various MWA science groups were clarified, and the LST range that we need in compact config aligns quite nicely with the needs of the EoR group
• MWA Phase 3 will happen “in multiple phases”, with the transition from 128T to 256T happening over time, probably not beginning before early 2023—this is the current plan, anyway.
• PSR #2
• J0026-1956 was actually first detected by GBT!
• Paper still pushing forward, which focuses on drifting analysis
• Showed the GBT detection (~85 seconds of data)
• Has been seen in Parkes 70cm
• Paper currently in (first) MWA collaboration review period
• GMRT Cycle 41 follow up:
• Band 3 and Band 4 in Nov/Dec
• Full polar mode used
• Source position good to ~1 arcmin
• RFI is a major problem
• Band 4 imaging analysis yet to come
• Possible early indication of <1 arcmin positional offset
• Band 3 observation seems to imply smaller nulling fraction, but other observations show a different story
• Not yet calibrated for polarisation, but even uncalibrated observation of test pulsar (B2327-20) show first-order-correctness
• PSR #3 (J1002-2036):
• Possibly low luminosity pulsar, at high latitudes
• Similar in some ways to PSR #1
• Used localisation method to get another ~20% increase in S/N
• Also observed in a 2nd detection!
• Vindication of SMART strategy, with ~10 deg overlap between adjacent pointings
• pdmp detection also shown
• Other summary updates:
• Remaining SMART obs may have to wait till 2022A/2022B
• ASTAC proposal for more OzSTAR time in 2022A has been submitted
• Discussion:
• SD: how many harmonics are summed in search?
• NS: 16 (in PRESTO)
• SD: Losing sensitivity to wide profile pulsars?
• NS: Don’t think so because 16 is max. It still searches 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 harmonics
• RB: Interesting, PSRs #1, #2, #3 are in order of increasing period! PSR #3’s duty cycle is ~2.5%
• RB: Whether to change max number of harmonics can wait until second (deep) search
• Sam’s update:
• Latest practice data set was successful = can now beamform MWAX data
• Uses Hyperdrive (“RTS v2.0”), which can currently do DI calibration
• Legacy data can still use RTS, but MWAX data will only use Hyperdrive
• In beam calibration not yet possible – requires offline MWAX correlator to be installed, e.g. on Garrawarla, which is in progress
• VCSBeam code is now “understood”, in terms of coordinate bases used for Jones matrices, etc.
• Further polarimetric calibration of the beam still a work in progress
• MS & SS: Maybe Emil’s imaging technique is what’s needed
• Nick’s update:
• Showing off the new database
• Hosted at DataCentral
• Still working out kinks, data not yet uploaded
• Makes authentication really streamlined, amenable to getting more people (e.g. high school students) helping the pulsar-hunting effort
• Discussion:
• WvS: What can people download?
• RB: Best pulsar detections, but details would be good topic for future discussion, e.g. 10 second archives (full freq resolution?)

• Zhongli update
• Getting ready to process on SHAO cluster, but needs some coordination
• SHAO cluster has computing resources to process 
• Some tests have been carried out, using presto based suite 
• NS: work out the best way to do the full search before doing any processing
• RB: Take this up a busy day discussion item - software/pipeline coordination critically important for processing coordination, the use of dissimilar pipelines to process survey data must be avoided (and will not be beneficial in the long run)
• Mengyao
• New database - how to register? 
• NS: make a new account