Mukul Bhattacharya

"Source properties and population distributions of Fast radio bursts"

Abstract: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are radio transients of possible cosmological origin with millisecond duration and Jansky-level brightness, mostly detected from high Galactic latitudes. Until date, more than 120 non-repeating FRBs and 20 repeating FRBs have been published, and many more bursts are expected to be detected in the near future with the upcoming high-sensitivity radio transient surveys. In this talk, we will discuss a formalism that we developed to estimate the intrinsic properties of FRB sources directly from observations by assuming a fixed DM contribution from a MW-like host galaxy, pulse broadening models for turbulent plasma and a flat FRB energy spectrum. We present the results from our Monte Carlo code which constrains the properties of the FRB source, its host galaxy and scattering in the intervening plasma from the current observations. We use the published FRB follow-up data to determine whether the repeating FRB 121102 is likely to be representative of the entire FRB population. We further extend our analysis to constrain the spatial density of these bursts from their observed specific flux distribution and show that these events might originate from a relatively young stellar population with a steep luminosity distribution.