Identification of RFI in the search of transient radio pulses from magnetars

Paper in proceeding, 2025

The study of transient cosmic radio signals in astronomy has become extremely attractive in the last two decades, with discoveries such as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and the presence of transient radio pulses in sources such as magnetars [1,2]. One of the major challenges in this field is to determine whether detected pulses are from an astronomical source or from terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI). In the search for single pulses from both known astronomical sources, such as magnetars, and unknown sources, a dispersion measure (DM) search for single pulses is one of the main methods to detect them [3]. When the DM of the source is known, it is common practice to dedisperse the observation file only at the source's DM to search for single pulses, or to record the data using coherent dedispersion, which produces a file that is dedipersed at the specified value. When searching over a range of DM values, one would expect RFI to appear at low DM values. Only in cases where the RFI is intense could it be seen at higher values of DM, as shown in Figure 1.