Casey Law edited accomplishments.tex  about 10 years ago

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Based on that success, I began collaborating with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to develop the world's most powerful radio interferometer, the Very Large Array (VLA), for millisecond imaging. After a 3-month residency project, our team unveiled its first fruits: the first blind detection of a millisecond radio transient (See \url{http://goo.gl/bx0L39}; Law et al. 2012, Astrophysical Journal, 760, 6). This transient was a rare kind of neutron star that pulses sporadically and has traditionally been studied by large, single-dish radio telescopes. By using an interferometer, we precisely localizated the neutron star and could search for counterparts in optical surveys; the lack of an optical counterpart gave us insight into the formation of the neutron star.  We have continued to develop the VLA for millisecond imaging and now routinely use it to observe at data rates of 300 MB s$^{-1} s$^{-1}$  or 1 TB hour$^{-1}$. %Currently, we are recording data to disk at a rate of 1 TB hour$^{-1}$ and processing it on compute clusters near the VLA, at Los Alamos National Lab, and NERSC. The internet is too slow to transport the 1 TB hour$^{-1}$ data stream, so we ship disks to our computing centers. This approach is complex and not sustainable in the large campaigns needed to find many fast radio transients.