Highest Frequency Detection of FRB 121102 at 4–8 GHz Using the Breakthrough Listen Digital Backend at the Green Bank Telescope

By V. Gajjar, A. Siemion, D. Price, C. Law, D. Michilli, Jason W. T. Hessels, S. Chatterjee, A. Archibald, G. Bower, C. Brinkman and 21 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the first detections of the repeating fast radio burst source FRB 121102 above 5.2 GHz. Observations were performed using the 4–8 GHz receiver of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope with the Breakthrough Listen digital backend. We present the spectral, temporal, and polarization properties of 21 bursts detected within the first 60 minutes of a total of 6 hr of observations. These observations comprise the highest burst density yet reported in the literature, with 18 bursts being detected in the first 30 minutes. A few bursts clearly show temporal sub-structure with distinct spectral properties. These sub-structures superimpose to provide an enhanced peak signal-to-noise ratio at higher trial dispersion measures. Broad features occur in ∼1 GHz wide subbands that typically differ in peak frequency between bursts within the band. Finer-scale structures (∼10–50 MHz) within these bursts are consistent with the structure expected from Galactic diffractive interstellar scintillation. The bursts exhibit nearly 100% linear polarization, and a large average rotation measure of 9.359 ± 0.012 × 104 rad m−2 (in the observer’s frame). No circular polarization was found for any burst. We measure an approximately constant polarization position angle in the 13 brightest bursts. The peak flux densities of the reported bursts have average values (0.2 ± 0.1 Jy) similar to those seen at lower frequencies (<3 GHz), while the average burst widths (0.64 ± 0.46 ms) are relatively narrower.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b1ecf1ba4fcd2ed8b298dc52769f2359fbda68c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Metzger
2. B. Margalit
3. L. Sironi
4. D. R. Lorimer
5. B. W. Stappers
6. Ingrid Stairs
7. Bing Zhang
8. E. Keane

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. B. Margalit
2. B. Metzger
3. B. W. Stappers
4. V. Morello
5. A. Weltman
6. Kendrick M. Smith
7. L. Sironi
8. E. Keane

Citations in the corpus

• Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, unknown): “Image reproduced with permission from Zhang (2020b), copyright by Springer Nature”
• Possible periodic activity in the repeating FRB 121102 (2020, background): “Of all the repeating sources, FRB 121102 has been studied extensively across a broad range of radio frequencies from 600 MHz (Josephy et al. 2019) to 8 GHz (Gajjar et al. 2018a).”
• A living theory catalogue for fast radio bursts (2018, background): “A synchrotron maser might result from the coherently reflected particles in the shock front (Gallant et al., 1992).”
• Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (2021, background): “Many bursts from repeaters, on the other hand, show Gaussian-like emission bandwidths of 100–200MHz in the CHIME band (400–800MHz; e.g., CHIME/FRB Collaboration et al. 2019b) and up to a GHz at 4–8 GHz (Gajjar et al. 2018), at varying central frequencies.”
• Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, background): “This is consistent with the non-detection of X-ray or gamma-ray counterparts simultaneous with detected bursts from FRB121102 or other FRBs (DeLaunay et al. 2016; Scholz et al. 2017).”