CHIME All-sky Multiday Pulsar Stacking Search (CHAMPSS): Power Spectrum Injections and Survey Sensitivity

Abstract

Artificial signal injection into real data is a key tool in time-domain radio astronomy, with particular import to the study of pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Many surveys inject into the time series to probe observational biases impacting the detection of radio transients. In the case of the CHIME All-sky Multiday Pulsar Stack Search (CHAMPSS), the computational demands of both hardware and software time series injections force an alternative approach. We present methods for injecting artificial pulsar signals into the Fourier power spectrum. The injection process detailed here is computationally negligible compared to the overhead of the CHAMPSS search pipeline. We use injections to probe the in-system biases of the CHAMPSS survey. CHAMPSS is most sensitive to pulsars with frequencies on the order of 0.1 - 100 Hz and fluxes > 1 mJy. Our injections show weak overall sensitivity dependence on other factors such as dispersion measure (DM), duty cycle, and sky coordinates, but complex non-monotonic interactions between all parameters. Our findings suggest that frequency-dependent noise, especially low-frequency or "red" noise, and sampling limitations at higher frequencies are the dominant extrinsic factors decreasing CHAMPSS' sensitivity to pulsars.