Optimizing Pulsar Search with NenuFAR

This internship will be hosted by the ASTRO team at the LPC2E/CNRS in Orléans. The main research interests of the group is on radio transients including pulsars, fast radio bursts as well as SETI. The ASTRO team boasts the largest pulsar research group in France and is closely connected to the Nançay Radio Astronomical Observatory in the forest of Sologne. 

The ASTRO team currently has 6 permanent staff, 1 postdoctoral researcher and 3 PhD students. We typically welcome 1 to 2 M2 interns in the summer. 

Accommodation can be arranged on the CNRS campus at roughly €400/month. Lunch at the CNRS cantine is subsidized.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron stars. Thanks to the extreme stability of pulsar rotation, pulsars are considered “cosmic clocks” with a wide range of astrophysical applications. Pulsar discoveries have directly resulted in two Nobel prizes (1974 and 1993). Collectively, pulsar-related referred articles have led to over 500,000 citations; the discovery of pulsars is therefore a gateway to new science. 

Although it has been over 50 years since the first pulsar was discovered in 1967, pulsar searching is still in its early stage and the discovery space remains largely unexplored. Neutron star population synthesis studies suggest that there are ~120,000 potentially observable pulsars in our Galaxy, although currently just over 3000 pulsars are known. Traditionally, single-dish radio telescopes can only focus on a single point in the sky, limiting the sky mapping speed and hence the number of pulsar discoveries. In addition, the very-low frequency range remains relatively unexplored. 

The newly commissioned NenuFAR telescope in France opens a new window in the very-low frequency range between 10 and 85 MHz. This unique frequency range and the large field-of-view of NenuFAR thus make it a promising instrument to undertake an exhaustive pulsar survey in the low frequency regime. Since 2020, NenuFAR has been conducting a blind (untargeted) pulsar search above declination 39°. Over 4000 hours of data have been collected to date of which only ⅓ processed. 

During this internship, the trainee will help optimize the data processing pipeline (in python) with the goal of improving the throughput of the search. There is also the possibility of deploying the pipeline on the 28-petaflop Jean Zay High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster operated by IDRIS/CNRS. We will work on aspects of parallelization, portability and modularization of the code. The trainees will also have the opportunity to gain insight into radio astronomy as well as to make first-hand pulsar discoveries. 

We are looking for candidates with prior python programming experience and who want to further strengthen their computing profiles. Knowledge in astronomy is preferred but not obligated.

We are only able to employ students with permits to work in France. This includes European citizens as well as students (from any nationalities) who are currently enrolled in a French university.