Targeted Search for Fast Radio Bursts with Nanshan 26 m Radio Telescope

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are radio transients that are bright and have short duration, with their physical mechanism not being fully understood. We conducted a targeted search for bursts from FRB 20201124A between 2021 June 2 and July 20. High time-resolution data were collected for 104.5 hr using the ROACH2-based digital backend. We introduce the details of our FRB search pipeline which is based on HEIMDALL and FETCH. Testing of the injected mock FRBs search could help us better understand the performance of the pipelines, and improve the search algorithms and classifiers. To study the efficiency of our pipeline, 5000 mock FRBs were injected into the data and searched using the pipeline. The results of the mock FRB search show that our pipeline can recover almost all (greater than or similar to 90%) the injected mock FRBs above a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) threshold of 15, and the performance is still acceptable (greater than or similar to 80%) for injected S/Ns from 10 to 15. The recovery fraction displays relations with S/N, dispersion measure and pulse width. No bursts were detected from FRB 20201124A in the middle of 2021. The non-detection of FRB 20201124A may be due to its quiet phase window or no emission above the threshold of the Nanshan telescope.

Automated summary

This study conducted a targeted search for bursts from FRB 20201124A and tested the performance of the search pipeline using injected mock FRBs. The results showed high recovery rates and acceptable performance, but no bursts were detected from FRB 20201124A in the middle of 2021.