Casey Law edited untitled.tex  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: 6ca9f02b76ef873108c2f1742bdac75275dc401e

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All 63.3 hours of time on extragalctic fields has been searched for transients with dispersion measures from 0 to 3000 pc cm$^{-3}$ at a timescale of 5 ms. Figure \ref{snrhist} shows the typical SNR histogram of candidates greater than $6.5\sigma$, which are saved for analysis. Nearly all candidates are consistent with thermal noise. Fewer than 10 candidates deviated slightly from the thermal noise distribution and were inspected in detail. All of these candidates were found to be affected by RFI or were highly sensitive to flagging or imaging parameters.  Our analysis shows that we can exclude the presence of astrophysical transients on timescales of 5 milliseconds and below. We measured data quality at regular intervals throughout the search and found that roughly 1\% of images had noise that was more than twice the median image noise. Our flux-calibrated observations have a median image noise of 12--14 mJy, as expected for 5-ms, L-band images made with data from 26 good antennas and 230 MHz of bandwidth. To include variance in the noise measurements, we define a 96\% completeness for a $1\sigma$ image sensitivity of 15 mJy or an $8\sigma$ flux limit of 120 mJy. Observations of pulsar B0355+54 at a range of offset positions shows that our end-to-end imaging  sensitivity scales as expected for the VLA primary beam gain pattern. This end-to-end test also confirms that our transient search pipeline works as expeted.  Figure \ref{rate_pub} summarizes the published FRB event rates and the VLA rate limit to FRBs shorter than our integration time of 5 ms. In constructing this figure, we discovered that the sensitivity of published surveys are defined inconsistently. \citet{2014arXiv1404.2934S} calculate the mean beam gain within the FWHM. \citet{2007Sci...318..777L} use the measured fluence of their detection to define a fluence limit. Finally, \citet{2013Sci...341...53T} don't report a fluence limit at all, but instead measure the mean fluence of all detections. For this figure, we use the mean beam gain, as in \citet{2014arXiv1404.2934S}, although this clearly overestimates the sensitivity at the FWHM.