Wide Field Beamformed Observation with MeerKAT

Abstract

Large-scale beamforming with radio interferometers has the potential to revolutionize the science done with pulsars and fast radio bursts by improving the survey efficiency for these sources. We describe a wide-field beamformer for the MeerKAT radio telescope and outline strategies to optimally design such surveys. For software implementation of these techniques, Mosaic is introduced and its application in the MeerKAT telescope is presented. We show initial results using the beamformer by observing a globular cluster to track several pulsars simultaneously and demonstrate the source localization capability of this observation.