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arXiv · 2610.37034

FLITS: an interactive, reproducible workbench for fast radio burst analysis

Dirk Kuiper·Ziggy Pleunis·Jason W. T. Hessels
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Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief flashes of radio emission whose time, frequency, and polarization structure constrain their sources and propagation environments. FLITS (Fast-Look Interactive Transient Suite) is an open-source Python package with a browser interface for analysing detected bursts. It combines data inspection, interference mitigation, measurement, and modelling, including fits of the fitburst burst model, in a shared session, and reads SIGPROC filterbank, PSRFITS, and CHIME/FRB HDF5 data. The same routines measure larger samples from the command line and flag bursts whose automatic selections need checking. Trial dispersion measures can be scored by signal-to-noise, by burst structure, or with a smoothed-structure metric that also reports the range of dispersion measures consistent with the best one. Portable session files retain the selected data regions, excluded channels, calibration inputs, available results, input-data checksum, and software provenance, and supported measurements can be replayed from the command line and compared with their saved values. Uncertainty labels identify missing calibration information. A public reference workflow provides downloadable data and numerical checks.

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Dirk Kuiper, Ziggy Pleunis, Jason W. T. Hessels. 2026-10-27. FLITS: an interactive, reproducible workbench for fast radio burst analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37034

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