FRB science results from CHIME

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a recently discovered, poorly understood class of transient event, and understanding their origin has become a central problem in astrophysics. I will present FRB science results from CHIME, a new interferometric telescope at radio frequencies 400-800 MHz. Since 2018, CHIME has found ~20 times more FRBs than all other telescopes combined, including ~60 new repeating FRBs, the first repeating FRB with periodic activity, and an FRB pulse in our own galaxy from a known magnetar. These results were made possible by new algorithms which can be used to build radio telescopes orders of magnitude more powerful than CHIME. Looking to the future, I'll talk about two projects in progress: outrigger telescopes for CHIME, and CHORD, a new telescope with ~10 times the CHIME mapping speed.

Biography: Kendrick Smith is the Daniel Family James Peebles Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is a "data-oriented" cosmologist: his work is a mixture of theoretical physics, phenomenology, computational physics, statistics, and data analysis. He has been a member of several large experiments, including the WMAP and Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) satellites. Most recently, he has joined CHIME, a new experiment in British Columbia which aims to measure the radio sky to orders of magnitude better sensitivity than previous all-sky surveys, with a wide variety of applications. It is the first new Canadian research telescope in several decades. His best-known work is on CMB data analysis and phenomenology, including a classification of observable signals from self-interactions of the inflaton, and the first detection of gravitational lensing in the CMB. Recently, he has been interested in new data analysis techniques for large scale structure and radio astronomy. (Credit: https://perimeterinstitute.ca/people/kendrick-smith)