Asking Fast Radio Bursts for More than Reionization History
Abstract
We propose different estimators to probe the intergalactic medium (IGM) during epoch of reionization (EoR) using the dispersion measure () of the fast radio bursts. We consider three different reionization histories, which we can distinguish with a total of measurements during EoR if their redshifts are known. We note that the redshift derivatives of are also directly sensitive to the reionization history. The major point of this work is to explore the variance in the measurements and the information encoded in them. We find that the all-sky average gets biased from the line-of-sight (LoS) fluctuations in the measurements introduced by the ionization of IGM during EoR. We find that the ratio depends directly on the ionization bubble sizes as well as the reionization history. On the other hand, we also find that angular variance (coined as ) of encodes the information about the duration of reionization and the typical bubble sizes as well. We establish the usefulness of variances in using toy models of reionization and later verify it with the realistic reionization simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.03255,
title = {Asking Fast Radio Bursts for More than Reionization History},
author = {Abinash Kumar Shaw and Raghunath Ghara and Paz Beniamini and Saleem Zaroubi and Pawan Kumar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.03255},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
18 pages, 16 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ with moderate changes