Relating empirical data to Poisson statistics: detecting embedded pulsed laser signal

Ben_S

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May 7, 2018
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I retired from physics and engineering more than 20 years ago. Thus, my higher math skills vaporized long ago. I also had a very limited background in statistics. That said, for the past 10 years I have been developing instruments for the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory to detect pulsed laser signals embedded in individual stellar backgrounds. It has long been assumed by the SETI community that these signals, likely detectable either as coincident or otherwise grouped sets of photons, would follow the rules of Poisson distribution. That assumption, however, has never been properly documented in fact. After having developed several versions of detectors, I noticed that for all of these instruments the event detection rate did not occur as expected. Rather, the rate of detection fits very closely with the square root of the Poisson solution. The latest and most advanced detector utilizes PECL logic and digital discriminators. I'll be glad to fill in all of the blanks if anyone is interested in looking at this problem. It may be trivially obvious to those familiar with the art, but I could use some help. For those interested in the observatory and my work, visit: www.optical-seti.org. Best from Ben_S
 
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