The Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) pulsar survey—I. Survey design and processing pipeline

We present an overview of the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) pulsar survey that exploits MWA's large field view and voltage capture system to sky south 30 degree in declination for pulsars fast transients 140-170 MHz band. The is enabled by advent Phase II compact configuration, which offers enormous efficiency beam-forming processing costs, thereby making all-sky this magnitude tractable with MWA. Even long dwell times (4800 s), data collection can be completed < 100 hours telescope time, while still retaining ability reach a limiting sensitivity ~2-3 mJy. Each observation processed generate ~5000-8000 tied-array beams tessellate full ~610 square view, are then search pulsars. voltage-capture recording allows multitude post hoc options including reprocessing higher time resolution. Due substantial computational cost searches at low frequencies, undertaken multiple passes: first pass, shallow performed, where 10 minutes each processed, reaching about one-third sensitivity. Here we initial results. Further details discoveries census low-frequency detections presented companion paper. Future plans include deeper acceleration target binary millisecond Simulation analysis forecasts ~300 new upon completion processing. SMART will also complete digital record sky, serve as valuable reference future planned Square Kilometre Array.