We are performing a transient, microsecond timescale radio sky survey, called "Astropulse," using the Arecibo telescope. Astropulse searches for brief (0.4 {\mu}s to 204.8 {\mu}s), wideband (relative to its 2.5 MHz bandwidth) radio pulses centered at 1,420 MHz. Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and scans the sky between declinations of -1.33 and 38.03 degrees. We obtained 1,540 hours of data in each of 7 beams of the ALFA receiver, with 2 polarizations per beam. Examination of timescales on the order of a few microseconds is possible because we used coherent dedispersion. The more usual technique, incoherent dedispersion, cannot resolve signals below a minimum timescale. However, coherent dedispersion requires more intensive computation than incoherent dedispersion. The required processing power was provided by BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.
@article{arxiv.1211.1338,
title = {Astropulse: A Search for Microsecond Transient Radio Signals Using Distributed Computing. I. Methodology},
author = {J. Von Korff and P. Demorest and E. Heien and E. Korpela and D. Werthimer and J. Cobb and M. Lebofsky and D. Anderson and B. Bankay and A. Siemion},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.1338},
year = {2015}
}