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.  --- Leading VLA FRB project, M31 search, RRAT search   %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 We have continued  to transport develop  the 1 TB hour$^{-1}$ data stream, so we ship disks to our computing centers. This approach is complex VLA for millisecond imaging  and not sustainable in the large campaigns needed now routinely use it  to find many fast radio transients.     %An exciting new class of radio transients is the "fast radio burst" (FRB; Thornton et al. 2013, Science, 341, 53). Discovered in all-sky pulsar surveys by single-dish telescopes, their dispersion is an order of magnitude larger than expected from the Galaxy and consistent with propagation through the intergalactic medium. If FRBs lie observe  at cosmological distances, their dispersion can be used to measure properties of the intergalactic medium. Beyond using FRBs as probes, understanding the origin of FRBs may have relevance to gamma-ray bursts and sources data rates  of gravitational waves. 300 MB s$^{-1} or 1 TB hour$^{-1}$.  %The most distant pulsar known was recently detected in Andromeda (Rubio-Hererra et al. 2013, MNRAS, 428, 2857). Dispersion of a sample of such transients will directly measure the baryons in the outer fringes (the "halo") of the Milky Way and M31. Roughly 50\% of baryons in the local universe have not been directly detected and fast radio transients may help solve this "missing baryon problem".   %Nearer %Currently, we are recording data  to our own Galaxy, pulsar surveys have discovered the "rotating radio transient" (RRAT; McLaughlin et al. 2006, Nature, 439, 817), disk at  a spinning neutron star that sporadically pulses. While a few dozen RRATs are now known, rate of 1 TB hour$^{-1}$ and processing  it on compute clusters near the VLA, at Los Alamos National Lab, and NERSC. The internet  is unclear whether they are tied too slow  to extreme objects like magnetars or simply ordinary pulsars that emit bright pulses detectable individually. 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.