Scintillated microlensing: measuring cosmic distances with fast radio bursts

Abstract

We propose a novel means of directly measuring cosmological distances using scintillated microlensing of fast radio bursts (FRBs). In standard strong lensing measurements of cosmic expansion, the main source of systematic uncertainty lies in modeling the mass profile of galactic halos. Using extra-galactic stellar microlensing to measure the Hubble constant avoids this systematic uncertainty as the lens potential of microlenses depends only on a single parameter: the mass of the lens. FRBs, which may achieve nanosecond precision on lensing time delays, are well-suited to precision measurements of stellar microlensing, for which the time delays are on the order of milliseconds. However, typical angular separations between the microlensed images on the order of microarcseconds make the individual images impossible to spatially resolve with ground-based telescopes. We propose leveraging scintillation in the ISM to resolve the microlensed images, effectively turning the ISM into an astrophysical-scale interferometer. Using this technique, we estimate a 6\% uncertainty on $H_0$ from a single observed scintillated microlensing event, with a sub-percent uncertainty on $H_0$ achievable with only 30 such events. With an optical depth for stellar microlensing of $10^{-3}$, this may be achievable in the near future with upcoming FRB telescopes.