Fast Radio Burst Dispersion Measure Distribution as a Probe of Helium Reionization

Abstract

Fast radio burst (FRB) discoveries are occurring rapidly, with thousands expected from upcoming surveys. The dispersion measures (DM) observed for FRB include important information on cosmological distances and the ionization state of the universe from the redshift of emission until today. Rather than considering the DM-redshift relation, we investigate the statistical ensemble of the distribution of dispersion measures. We explore the use of this abundance information, with and without redshift information, to probe helium reionization. Carrying out Monte Carlo simulations of FRB survey samples, we examine the effect of different source redshift distributions, host galaxy models, sudden vs gradual reionization, and covariance with cosmological parameters on determination of helium reionization properties. We find that a fluence limited survey with 10 4 FRBs can discriminate different helium reionization histories at ∼ 6σ using the DM-distribution of bursts, without redshift information (and ∼ 10σ with redshifts).

A new measurement of the Hubble constant using Fast Radio Bursts

“…The large future samples of FRBs also make it possible to use DM correlations to probe the perturbations in the electron distribution on very large scales (Masui & Sigurdson 2015;Shirasaki et al 2017;Rafiei-Ravandi et al 2020;Bhattacharya et al 2020;Takahashi et al 2021). This provides a unique way to, for example, constrain primordial non-Gaussianity (Reischke et al 2021b) or deviations from General Relativity (Reischke et al 2021a).…”

“…Since the DM is a noisy distance estimate, FRBs with known host can be used to compile a DM -redshift relation. This turns FRBs into standardisable radio transmitters, which can be used to probe the baryon content of the Universe at late times (Walters et al 2019;Macquart et al 2020), the ionisation history of the IGM (Jaroszynski 2019;Bhattacharya et al 2020;Pagano & Fronenberg 2021) or the current expansion rate (Wu et al 2020).…”

A Decade and a Half of Fast Radio Burst Observations

“…It has also been suggested that gravitationally lensed FRBs could independently provide constraints on two of the most important cosmological parameters: the Hubble constant [90,91] and cosmic curvature [86,92]. FRBs detectable with next generation telescopes like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) at redshifts of 3 and above, are expected to carry the imprint of the epoch of helium reionization [22,[93][94][95]. At the epoch of reionization we expect an observable variation in the steepness of the dispersion measure -redshift relation also known as the 'Macquart relation'.…”

Constraints on the abundance of primordial black holes with different mass distributions from lensing of fast radio bursts

“…For instance, it was estimated that Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiments (CHIME) will detect ∼ 10 4 FRBs per year, of which ∼ 10 3 FRBs with redshift information will be probed [50]. Although the radiation mechanism and progenitors of these mysteries are still intensively debated 2 , some unique and useful observational properties of FRBs, including clean temporal shape, small temporal duration, cosmological origin, and high all-sky event rate have been proposed as promising cosmological and astrophysical probes, such as testing fundamental physics [55,56], constraining cosmological models [57][58][59][60], baryon census [61][62][63][64][65], reionization history of Helium [66,67], millilensed lensed FRBs for probing compact dark matter [68][69][70], galaxy lensing time delay variations for probing the the motion of the FRB source [71], and time delay distances of strongly lensed FRBs for precisely measuring the expansion rate and curvature of the universe [72,73].…”