Probing the cosmic web with fast radio bursts: II. Scintillation

Abstract

We consider the formation of multiphase gas in cosmic web objects (CWOs) through cooling and fragmentation within the shock-heated medium of cosmic sheets and filaments, and the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of haloes. This leads to dense, cool ($\sim10^{4}\,\mathrm{K}$), small-scale cloudlets in pressure equilibrium with their surroundings. Such ionized overdensities can affect the propagation of radio waves emitted by fast radio bursts (FRBs), allowing us to probe the small-scale structure in CWOs by examining their impact on the scintillation pattern of the observed FRB flux. While we find that the probability of encountering a high-temperature filament or sheet with cold cloudlets is rather small and usually confined to high redshifts, the expected high rates of FRBs may still permit detection through scintillation along rare sightlines. We suggest scintillation from the Milky Way (MW) interstellar medium as a promising probe: CWO plasma screens can suppress it, placing constraints on their cold-gas properties. Filaments and sheets can suppress MW scintillation from sources at $z_\mathrm{S}\gtrsim2$ and $3$, respectively, while cold and turbulent cloudlets in the CGM can be probed by sources at redshifts as low as $z_\mathrm{S}\sim0.5$, constraining remarkably low volume-filling fractions, $f_\mathrm{v}$ (e.g. $f_\mathrm{v}\gtrsim10^{-5}$ for $z_\mathrm{S}\gtrsim2$). To provide testable predictions, we estimate the fraction of FRBs expected to encounter CWOs that may suppress MW scintillation below a given frequency, and express this as a function of the average extragalactic dispersion measure. Future FRB samples could map these constraints onto bounds on the existence and properties of cloudlets in CWOs, such as their density, size, $f_\mathrm{v}$, and turbulence.