SPATIAL FOURIER TRANSFORM FOR DETECTION AND ANALYSIS OF PERIODIC ASTROPHYSICAL PULSES

This paper analyzes the potential of the Spatial Fourier transform (SFT) for detection of a periodic astrophysical signal and for estimation of parameters of the signal. In place of de-dispersing filter bank data for each Dispersion Measure (DM) trial and then integrating over frequency channels to yield a one-dimensional signal, we apply SFT to filter bank data, then detect periodic astrophysical signals and analyze their parameters such as DM and rotational period. This approach allows searching for periodic astrophysical signals in real time. Its complexity is dominated by the complexity of the SFT. The results of our analysis show promise. Using simulated data we demonstrate that it takes about 3 minutes of observation time to detect a pulsar at an S/N value of 8σ. The SFT data also provide information about the rotation of pulsars and lower and upper bounds on their DM value.