Are the distributions of Fast Radio Burst properties consistent with a cosmological population?

Understand

High time resolution radio surveys over the last few years have discovered a population of millisecond-duration transient bursts called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which remain of unknown origin.

• FRBs exhibit dispersion consistent with propagation through a cold plasma and dispersion measures indicative of an origin at cosmological distances.
• In this paper we perform Monte Carlo simulations of a cosmological population of FRBs, based on assumptions consistent with observations of their energy distribution, their spatial density as a function of redshift and the properties of the interstellar and intergalactic media.
• We examine whether the dispersion measures, fluences, inferred redshifts, signal-to-noises and effective widths of known FRBs are consistent with a cosmological population.