English

Asking Fast Radio Bursts for More than Reionization History

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-10-17 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We propose different estimators to probe the intergalactic medium (IGM) during epoch of reionization (EoR) using the dispersion measure (DM{\rm DM}) of the fast radio bursts. We consider three different reionization histories, which we can distinguish with a total of 1000DM\lesssim 1000\,{\rm DM} measurements during EoR if their redshifts are known. We note that the redshift derivatives of DM{\rm DM} are also directly sensitive to the reionization history. The major point of this work is to explore the variance in the DM{\rm DM} measurements and the information encoded in them. We find that the all-sky average DM(z)\overline{{\rm DM}}(z) gets biased from the line-of-sight (LoS) fluctuations in the DM{\rm DM} measurements introduced by the ionization of IGM during EoR. We find that the ratio σDM/DM\sigma_{\rm DM}/\overline{{\rm DM}} 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 structure function\textit{structure function}) of DM{\rm DM} encodes the information about the duration of reionization and the typical bubble sizes as well. We establish the usefulness of variances in DM{\rm DM} 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