Speaker
Description
The last decade has revealed that the Universe creates fast radio transients that are visible across giga-parsec distances and a vast range of timescales, lasting from tens of seconds to as short as nanoseconds. These ephemeral radio flashes occur sporadically and they must originate from coherent radiation processes in environments with extreme energy density. We aim to understand the physical origin(s) of these enigmatic signals and to use them as unique and powerful probes of the otherwise invisible matter and magnetic fields that lie between stars and galaxies. LOFAR2.0 offers us a new way to explore the sky as never before possible by giving a novel, wide-field view of the lowest radio frequencies observable from Earth at both high time and angular resolution. To turn LOFAR2.0 into a fast transient search machine, we are constructing the EuroFlash backend, which will receive a commensal stream of raw station data (and maybe even raw antenna data) to search for milliseconds- to seconds-duration transients in all observations. In this talk, I will outline the scientific case, technical approach, and project status.
