Probing primordial non-Gaussianity with Fast Radio Bursts

Understand

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are astrophysical transients of currently unknown origin, and so far several events have been detected at extragalactic distances.

• The dispersion measure (DM) of the radio signal is a probe of the integrated electron density along the line of sight and therefore allows to map the electron distribution within the large-scale structure.
• Since a fraction of electrons gets expelled from galaxies by feedback, they are anticorrelated with halos at large scales and hence the angular DM correlations show a scale-dependent bias caused by primordial non-Gaussianity.
• Although the signal is weaker than in other probes like galaxy clustering, FRBs can potentially probe considerably larger volumes.