Pulsar Surveys, Machine Learning and Single-Pulse Studies

This internship will be hosted by the ASTRO team at the LPC2E/CNRS in Orléans. The main research interests of the group is on radio transients including pulsars, fast radio bursts as well as SETI. The ASTRO team boasts the largest pulsar research group in France and is closely connected to the Nançay Radio Astronomical Observatory in the forest of Sologne. 

The ASTRO team currently has 6 permanent staff, 2 postdoctoral researcher and 4 PhD students. We typically welcome 1 to 2 M2 interns in the summer. 

Accommodation can be arranged on the CNRS campus at roughly €400/month. Lunch at the CNRS cantine is subsidized.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron stars that provide unique laboratories for studying fundamental physics, compact objects and the interstellar medium. Their periodic radio emission makes them well suited to large-scale surveys, while individual pulses provide insights into the physics of coherent radio emission. Despite decades of observations, a significant fraction of the Galactic pulsar population remains undiscovered, motivating the development of efficient analysis techniques.

During this internship, the trainee will get an opportunity to gain experience in two complementary areas of pulsar research: pulsar survey analysis with machine-learning-assisted candidate classification, and the study of individual pulsar pulses across widely separated radio frequencies.

The first part will involve a complete pulsar-search workflow, from simulations and population modelling to candidate generation and classification. The trainee will use tools such as PsrPopPy to generate synthetic pulsar populations, exploring distributions of periods, dispersion measures, luminosities and spatial positions. Synthetic pulsars will be injected into real survey data and processed through an existing search pipeline to evaluate recovery rates and characterize detection efficiency. The resulting candidates will be visually inspected to build a labelled dataset for exploring machine-learning methods to distinguish genuine pulsars from radio-frequency interference and other false positives, with the goal of improving candidate classification for large surveys.

The second part will focus on single-pulse emission from a pulsar observed at approximately 70 MHz and 1.4 GHz. Using an existing pipeline, the trainee will extract individual pulses, characterize their energy distributions statistically, and investigate possible log-normal or power-law behaviour and frequency-dependent changes. The results will be interpreted in the context of nulling, mode changing and giant pulses, with comparisons to Fast Radio Bursts where appropriate.

The internship will provide hands-on experience in radio astronomy, pulsar searches, population synthesis, statistical analysis, machine learning, Python-based scientific computing and the analysis of real observational data. The trainee will also have the opportunity to visit the Nançay Radio Observatory, participate in collaboration meetings and present their work to the wider pulsar research community.

We are looking for candidates with prior python programming experience and who want to further strengthen their computing profiles. Knowledge in astronomy is preferred but not obligated.

We are only able to employ Masters students who are currently enrolled in a French university, that is able to establish an internship convention with our institute.