Casey Law edited new.tex  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: 16922264c20468981f6e13305d32a3b129dbcd46

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Any constraint defined by this campaign will be the baseline upon which future observations can build. For example, a commensal, fast transient detection system could be fairly easily implemented for a 50 ms integration time to do the same FRB science at roughly 5 times higher flux limits. Constraints from that kind of observation would be more powerful when considered jointly with any VLA FRB project rate limit.  Our revisions to the flux limits of published FRB surveys highlight the unique contribution of an interferometer to understanding FRBs. Single-dish Our imaging tests on a pulsar show clearly how to define the limiting sensitivity at the FWHM, a point that single-dish rate constraints overlooked. Furthermore, single-dish  surveys typically quantify detections in SNR because it is inefficient to include end-to-end tests and flux calibration. The VLA FRB project builds these measurements in with modest overhead, giving us the ability to make robust constraints on the flux and rate of FRBs. New observations in D configuration will be more sensitive than existing B configuration observations, since our detection threshold is defined by the thermal noise in the images. Because each pixel in the image is independent, compact configurations produce images with fewer pixels and lower tail probabilities. This will allow us improve sensitivity by reducing our threshold from $8\sigma$ to $7.6\sigma$. The D configuration resolution of 50" will allow localization precision better than 3", more than 2 orders of magnitude better than any other FRB localization. This will give us unique galaxy associations to R-band depths of 24, equivalent to a median redshift of 0.6 \citep{2002AJ....123.1111B}.