Down-drifting, bandwidth and beaming of fast radio bursts
Abstract
'Downwards drifting' structures observed in fast radio bursts (FRBs) could naturally arise from a screen occurring after a small initial dispersion measure region. The screen imprints temporally sharp but broadband structure on the pulse that has already been dispersed, and the `structure-maximising' bulk of the dispersion measure is acquired further along the path to observer. If so, scaling of the drift rate of repeating FRBs with frequency suggests that the emission is beamed -- out of our line of sight -- with the circum-burst plasma deflecting the beam towards us. This in turn explains the observed limited, variable bandwidths of bursts despite broadband nature of the underlying emission. We summarise the geometric constraints on this simple model delivering much of the observed FRB spectro-temporal phenomenology, present generic predictions and discuss possible nature of modulation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.13549,
title = {Down-drifting, bandwidth and beaming of fast radio bursts},
author = {Artem Tuntsov and Ue-Li Pen and Mark Walker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.13549},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
6 pages of text, 3 figures that capture most of the text, posted before submitting to MNRAS to gratefully gather any feedback