Ramesh Bhat

Keegan Smith

Nick Swainston

Sam McSweeney

Zhongli Zhang

Susmita Sett

Marcin Sokolowski

Isaac Colleran

Mengyao Xue

Ryan Shannon

Willem van Straten

Survey ramping up

3 student projects connected to SMART survey

Have been awarded time on OzStar (1.5 million hours), looking ahead to Garrawarla

• 2-3 times speed increase on OzStar (compared to Galaxy)

Adopted strategy of “quick look, first pass” pipeline constrained by PhD timelines

• Limited DM steps, 5-10 mins of data

• New pulsar (J0036-1033) gives us hope!

• Also important for “quick” turnaround of data processing so that fields can be re-observed if necessary

• 96 known pulsars detected with Keegan’s pipeline

• 5 fields have been processed (although not sifted for candidates)

Alternative search strategies are being explored (cf Susmita & Marcin’s imaging pipeline)

ADACS proposal initially turned down, but CIC resources have been allocated

We have to take advantage of all remaining Phase 2 compact configuration time for data collection

• There will be a proposal call later this year

At least 60% data is in the can

• By the end, ~3PB, 0.5 million beams, 7 million core hours for 1 round of processing

Follow-up of J0036-1033 possible with ~10 existing archived VCS observations (both phase 1 and phase 2, extended and compact)

• For localisation, regridding/re-beamforming straightforward task w/out need for re-observing

• Sub-arcminute localisation unlocked

• Efforts to understand polarimetry -- for new pulsar (and more generally)

• Attempts to detect new pulsar in imaging

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  • So far unsuccessful

  • Suggests that pulsar is “low luminosity pulsar”

  • Proposal has been put in for Parkes, and will be put in for GMRT (deadline tomorrow)

• Will be basis for short paper

Just about finished processing (quick look) 9 observations.

Been through 1000’s of candidates

New Nextflow pipeline:

• Has improved efficiency, uses containers

• Can now process 1 obs per week

• Installed on Garrawarla, Ozstar, and (almost) at SHAO

ML part of pipeline helps a lot, but still produces many obvious noise candidates

Working to decentralise candidate ranking (so that it’s not just Nick doing it)

Also working on Single pulse candidates

• Likes LOFAR single pulse software/pipeline

• Have tried SHAO’s pipeline (STEP?) -- almost working, but indications that it may not be the best choice

• >15 candidates per beam → lots of candidates!!

Pipeline:

• Offline correlation (1 sec integration), RFI flagging, calibration, and other standard MWA processing, output = Stokes images from XX, YY

Looking for J0036-1033 in imaging

• RMS 12 mJy (I) and 2.5 mJy (V) images show nothing convincing at pulsar’s location

• Pointing towards pulsar is <5mJy

• Also, GMRT image of same area of sky shows nothing (which gets down to 2.5 mJy/beam)

• Can see other pulsars in the field with same imaging techniqu

LOFAR’s tree classifier

• DM curve, profile, freq-vs-phase, time-vs-phase features

Generative adversarial networks

• Isaac’s ongoing project

All available ML tools will feed into database app (with web interface) for human inspection.

Working with CIC to develop database/web app.

Fancy tricks for localisation? Follow up with Ryan’s FRB localisation techniques with ASKAP (Ryan to email Nick some Python code). May get down to ~1/10 of a (tied-array) beamwidth in precision.

Imaging can help weed out nights when ionosphere is very active and moves sources around

Test gridding method on known pulsar position to get errors

Not likely for Nick’s pulsar to be in a sidelobe -- sidelobe detections have characteristic frequency dependence.