An accurate and efficient algorithm for detection of radio bursts with an unknown dispersion measure, for single dish telescopes and interferometers

Understand

Astronomical radio bursts disperse while traveling through the interstellar medium.

• To optimally detect a short-duration signal within a frequency band, we have to precisely compensate for the pulse dispersion, which is a computationally demanding task.
• We present the Fast Dispersion Measure Transform (FDMT) algorithm for optimal detection of such signals.
• Our algorithm has a low theoretical complexity of 2N_f N_t+ N_t N_d log_2(N_f) where N_f, N_t and N_d are the numbers of frequency bins, time bins, and dispersion measure bins, respectively.