Ultra Fast Astronomy: Optimized Detection of Multimessenger Transients

Abstract

Ultra Fast Astronomy is a new frontier becoming enabled by improved detector technology allowing discovery of optical transients on millisecond to nanosecond time scales. These may reveal counterparts of energetic processes such as fast radio bursts, gamma ray bursts, gravitational wave events, or play a role in the optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence (oSETI). We explore some example science cases and their optimization under constrained resources, basically how to distribute observations along the spectrum of short duration searches of many targets or long searches over fewer targets. As a demonstration of the method we present some analytic and some numerical optimizations, of both raw detections and science characterization such as an information matrix analysis of constraining a burst delay -- flash duration relation.