What it takes to measure Reionization with Fast Radio Bursts

Stefan Heimersheim

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arXiv · 2203.12645

What it takes to measure Reionization with Fast Radio Bursts

Stefan Heimersheim

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Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are recently discovered extra-galactic radio transients which are now used as novel cosmological probes. We show how the Bursts' Dispersion Measure can model-independently probe the history of Hydrogen reionization. Using a FlexKnot free-form parameterization to reconstruct the reionization history we predict an 11% accuracy constraint on the CMB optical depth, and 4% accuracy on the midpoint of reionization, to be achieved with 100 FRBs originating from redshifts z>5.

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Stefan Heimersheim. 2022-03-23. What it takes to measure Reionization with Fast Radio Bursts. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12645

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