Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model

By Pawan Kumar, Wenbin Lu, M. Bhattacharya. 2017

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the observed properties of fast radio bursts (FRBs) and a number of general physical considerations to provide a broad-brush model for the physical properties of FRB sources and the radiation mechanism. We show that the magnetic field in the source region should be at least 10^{14} Gauss. This strong field is required to ensure that the electrons have sufficiently high ground state Landau energy so that particle collisions, instabilities, and strong electric and magnetic fields associated with the FRB radiation do not perturb electrons' motion in the direction transverse to the magnetic field and destroy their coherent motion; coherence is required by the high observed brightness temperature of FRB radiation. The electric field in the source region required to sustain particle motion for a wave period is estimated to be of order 10^{11} esu. These requirements suggest that FRBs are produced near the surface of magnetars perhaps via forced reconnection of magnetic fields to produce episodic, repeated, outbursts. The beaming-corrected energy release in these bursts is estimated to be ~10^{36} ergs, whereas the total energy in the magnetic field is at least ~10^{45} ergs. We provide a number of predictions for this model which can be tested by future observations. One of which is that short duration FRB-like bursts should exist at much higher frequencies, possibly up to optical.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d86e96a7c725c80c318c977cee78de23b1a48a4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. Pawan Kumar
4. B. Margalit
5. E. Berger
6. A. Beloborodov
7. L. Sironi
8. Wenbin Lu

Citations in the corpus

• Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, unknown): “A conservative estimation of the Lorentz factor Γ ∼ 10 (Kumar et al. 2017; Waxman 2017), ζ 1, and R ∼ 10(5) km give ∆t ∼ 10 μs.”
• A Concordance Picture of FRB 121102 as a Flaring Magnetar Embedded in a Magnetized Ion–Electron Wind Nebula (2018, background): “Among the few surviving possibilities are bursts created from a young flaring magnetar (Popov & Postnov 2013; Kulkarni et al. 2014; Lyubarsky 2014; Katz 2016; Lu & Kumar 2016; Beloborodov 2017; Kumar et al. 2017; Lu & Kumar 2017; Metzger et al. 2017; Nicholl et al. 2017b).”
• Fast Radio Bursts from Magnetars Born in Binary Neutron Star Mergers and Accretion Induced Collapse (2019, background): “One compelling model for repeating FRBs are bursts generated by a young flaring magnetar (Popov & Postnov 2013; Kulkarni et al. 2014; Lyubarsky 2014; Katz 2016; Lu & Kumar 2016, 2018; Beloborodov 2017; Kumar et al. 2017; Metzger et al. 2017; Nicholl et al. 2017b).”
• Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, background): “The two most commonly discussed mechanisms are curvature radiation produced close to the surface of the neutron star (e.g. Kumar et al. 2017; Lu & Kumar 2018) and the maser synchrotron process (e.g. Hoshino & Arons 1991).”
• A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “…(1) strongly magnetized NSs or magnetars can make FRBs (as advocated by many authors, e.g., Popov & Postnov 2010; Kulkarni et al. 2014; Katz 2016b; Kumar et al. 2017; Lyubarsky 2014; Beloborodov 2017; Metzger et al. 2019; Wadiasingh & Timokhin 2019), (2) the associated X-ray emission (and future…”
• Nine New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources from CHIME/FRB (2020, background): “…observe repeaters with relatively low RM values is at odds with this prediction but can possibly be explained by invoking a concomitant evolution of the peak flux frequency as a function of age, such that CHIME/FRB tends to detect older repeating sources (Kumar et al. 2017; Metzger et al. 2019).”
• Blast Waves from Magnetar Flares and Fast Radio Bursts (2019, background): “They are quite diverse, ranging from coherent emission of charge bunches inside a neutron star magnetosphere (e.g., Katz 2016; Kumar et al. 2017) to neutron stars interacting with an external plasma flow (Zhang 2018) to collisions of microscopic magnetic dipoles (Thompson 2017).”