Speaker
Description
The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio Transient Detector (CHORD), currently under construction, will be an important complement to the highly successful CHIME array, and is a flagship project of Canadian radio astronomy. CHORD may have excellent capabilities as a detector of transient phenomena on day to year timescales, including TDEs, GRBs, AGN flares and more. In this talk, I will present early results of my critical evaluation of CHORD as a detector of long-timescale radio transients. I will cover the powerful advantages offered by CHORD due to its drift-scan design, large field of view and excellent electronics, as well as the significant difficulties posed by the regular array design. I will talk about the detailed imaging simulation pipeline we have developed, which includes radiometer noise, AGN and SFGs with realistic distributions, intrinsic and extrinsic source variation, and realistic transients simulated using Redback. I will discuss the identification of the transients in simulated fields, and will finish by discussing the potential future of CHORD for this purpose, including the ability to monitor the location of many known optical transients and the implications of an expanded CHORD array.