English

Constraining the Baryon Fraction in the Intergalactic Medium with 92 localized Fast Radio Bursts

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-06-05 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are emerging as powerful cosmological probes for constraining the baryon fraction in the intergalactic medium (IGM), offering a promising avenue to address the missing baryon problem. In this paper, we analyze constraints on the IGM baryon fraction (fIGMf_\mathrm{IGM}) using 92 localized FRBs, incorporating a corrected probability distribution function for the IGM dispersion measure within three different cosmological models. We find that variations in the underlying cosmological model have a negligible impact on the inferred values of fIGMf_\mathrm{IGM}. While the NE2001 Galactic electron density model yields slightly higher fIGMf_\mathrm{IGM} values compared to the YMW16 model, the results are consistent within the 1σ\sigma confidence level. Additionally, there is no statistically significant evidence for redshift evolution in fIGMf_\mathrm{IGM}. Our analysis constrains fIGMf_\mathrm{IGM} to the range 0.80.90.8 \sim 0.9, providing strong support for the idea in which the majority of the missing baryons reside in the diffuse IGM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.03536,
  title  = {Constraining the Baryon Fraction in the Intergalactic Medium with 92 localized Fast Radio Bursts},
  author = {Yang Liu and Yuchen Zhang and Hongwei Yu and Puxun Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03536},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 2 figures, 1 table