Title: Locating ms-transients with the EVN
Speaker: Dr. Koenraad Keimpema (Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC, the Netherlands)
Time: Monday, 10:00 - 11:00am, November 23rd
Location: Large conference room, 3rd floor
Abstract: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright (~1Jy) , high dispersion measure, millisecond duration pulses of radio emission of unknown origin.  While the origin of the FRBs are unknown, as of yet no progenitor has been identified for any FRB, the observed dispersion measures point to an extra galactic origin. The very high brightness temperatures and short durations indicate a coherent emission mechanism, originating from a very compact central engine (<1000km). At present 11 FRBs have been detected, 10 events were discovered at the Parkes radio observatory and 1 event was observed by the Arecibo radio telescope. A crucial next step in the understanding of FRBs is to identify an astrophysical counterpart which cannot be done conclusively by the single dish instruments which have discovered the currently known FRBs. Here VLBI networks such as the European VLBI Network (EVN), which includes the Chinese radio observatories at Shanghai and Urumqi,  can contribute greatly as they combine a large collecting area with a milli-arcsecond angular resolution at L-band frequencies making it possible to identify a host galaxy. We have started a collaboration, the LOCATe project, to commensally search all EVN experiments correlated at JIVE for transient sources. During correlation SFXC, the software correlator used and maintained at JIVE, will stream high time resolution power spectral densities to a dedicated computing cluster at JIVE where the data will be processed by a single pulse search pipeline based on existing pulsar toolkits. Related reference: A. Keimpema, M.M. Kettenis, S.V. Pogrebenko, et al, The SFXC software correlator for Very Long Baseline Interferometry: Algorithms and Implementation, Exp. Astron, 39, 259 (2015)