Casey Law edited new.tex  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: 65cec33901f72ad8aa872e69afb0157f3c37531a

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For an assumed intrinsic temporal width of 5 ms, completing the 147-hour project would give us roughly 126 hours on target and a 50\% chance at detecting an FRB. With the existing 63 hours on target, we estimate that we had a roughly 10\% chance of detecting an FRB, for an assumed width of 5 ms. Prior to the downward revision in the fluence limit of \citet{2013Sci...341...53T}, we had a 50\% chance at detecting 3 FRBs. While this revision to the rate is frustrating, we feel that the science potential of an interferometric FRB detection still justifies the effort needed to complete the project.   We recognize that with a scheduling priority of "C", there is a strong possibility that not all of the remaining 71 hours in project 14A-425 will be observed. However, based on our arguments above and the fact that the scientific importance of the field of FRBs has only grown since the review of our proposal, we ask that the NRAO consider any options that will help us observe the remaining 71 hours. We are open to observing in the A- to D-configuration, although the computing requirements would require us to ignore all A-configuration locations. We ask that any time charged during reconfiguration is scaled to reflect the sensitivity of the subset in D-configuration. For example, for 18 antennas in the D-configuration locations, we would be charged for $18/27 = 0.66\%$ 66\%$  of the time until the 3-antenna rule applies. Even without a detection, any constraint from 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.