The PALFA survey (short for Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array) is a sensitive survey of the Galactic plane that is visible from the Arecibo telescope. PALFA began in 2004 and since then has discovered 111 new pulsars, and over half of these have been found in the last two years alone. This is thanks to an excellent pipeline written by Patrick Lazarus and tools developed for the Cyber SKA web interface (now being used by the GBNCC survey as well). One of the biggest challenges with PALFA is the amount of radio frequency interference (RFI) at the Arecibo Observatory, and a lot of work over the past year by Patrick, Paul Scholz, Scott Ransom, Vicky Kaspi, and myself has gone in to new techniques for mitigating this RFI. We are about to deploy an updated version of the pipeline that we hope will lead to the discovery of many, many more pulsars.
PALFA observes at a center frequency of 1.4 GHz for integration times up to 600 seconds. Combined with the awesome sensitivity of Arecibo, this makes PALFA one of the most sensitive pulsar surveys in the region of the Galaxy that we are observing. Consequently, we have been discovering many faint and distant pulsars, particularly MSPs. We expect to record nearly one PB (that's petabyte) of data by the time the survey is completed, and to deal with this huge data volume we process on the Guillimin supercomputer, operated by CLUMEQ. We have also developed a number of ratings and other tools for identifying the best candidate pulsars, and a great deal of work has gone into artificial intelligence programs to help reduce the amount of human inspection that's needed, particularly by Ingrid Stairs' group at the University of British Columbia.
I joined PALFA in 2011 and since then have focused mostly on improvements to the pipeline and on developing new and improved candidate ratings. I'm also timing a handful of new pulsars using the GBT, so that we can utilize as much Arecibo time as possible for new survey observations.