Constraining fast radio burst progenitors with gravitational lensing

Understand

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are new transient radio sources discovered recently.

• Because of the angular resolution restriction in radio surveys, no optical counter part has been identified yet so it is hard to determine the progenitor of FRBs.
• In this paper we propose to use radio lensing survey to constrain FRB progenitors.
• We show that, different types of progenitors lead to different probabilities for a FRB to be gravitationally lensed by dark matter halos in foreground galaxies, since different type progenitors result in different redshift distributions of FRBs.