Probing the Intergalactic Medium with Fast Radio Bursts

Understand

The recently discovered fast radio bursts (FRBs), presumably of extra-galactic origin, have the potential to become a powerful probe of the intergalactic medium (IGM).

• We point out a few such potential applications.
• We provide expressions for the dispersion measure and rotation measure as a function of redshift, and we discuss the sensitivity of these measures to the HeII reionization and the IGM magnetic field.
• Finally we calculate the microlensing effect from an isolate, extragalctic stellar-mass compact object on the FRB spectrum.