Results from the Fly’s Eye Fast Radio Transient Search at the Allen Telescope Array

The relatively unexplored fast radio transient parameter space is known to be home to a variety of interesting sources, including rotating radio transients (RRATs), γ-ray burst (GRB) afterglows and pulsar giant pulses. In addition, a variety of hypothesized but as yet unobserved phenomena, such as primordial black hole evap- oration (Rees, 1977), prompt emission associated with coalescing massive objects (Hansen & Lyutikov, 2008) and hyper-flares from magnetars (Popov & Postnov, 2007) have been suggested. The announcement by Lorimer et al. of the detection of a powerful ( 30 Jy) and highly dispersed (DM 375 pc cm-3) radio pulse in Parkes multi-beam survey data (Lorimer et al., 2007), and subsequent consternation, have demonstrated both the potential utility of bright radio pulses as probes of the ISM and IGM, as well as the need for wide-field surveys characterizing the fast radio transient population.

We present results from the 450-hour Fly’s Eye survey for powerful dispersed radio pulses at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The Fly’s Eye spectrometer processes 44 independent signal paths, each with a bandwidth of 209 MHz centered at 1420 MHz, and produces 128-channel power spectra accumulated for 0.6ms. Independent antenna-pointings of the extant 42-dish ATA yields a maximum total field-of-view of approximately 198 square degrees.