Presentation #102.09 in the session Pulsars, Radio Transients, & Pulsar Wind Nebulae — iPoster Session.
We carried out drift-scan observations using the 305-m Arecibo telescope in January and March 2020, when the observatory was temporarily closed due to earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic. We observed on 23 nights using the 7-beam ALFA receiver, collecting 160 hours in total. We searched the data for single pulse transients using the GPU-based dispersion utility Heimdall and the analysis produced more than 18 million candidates. We sorted out radio frequency interference and astrophysical-like candidates using the deep learning network FETCH and then visually inspected them to confirm transients. We also searched for repeated transient signals in our candidates. We found no evidence for new FRBs or transients in our data with signal-to-noise > 6. The sky transit time across a beam of the ALFA receiver was about 13 sec. Therefore, in addition to transients, bright pulsars with short periods can be detected in our data through periodicity searches. We are currently processing the data to search for pulsars using a PRESTO-based periodicity search pipeline. In parallel to periodicity searches, we also perform PRESTO-based single-pulse routines in this pipeline to conduct an independent transient search. The data processing is currently ongoing while collecting and inspecting periodicity-search candidates.