AU or pc? Inferring the distance of magnetized plasma near FRBs from propagation diagnostics
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are highly energetic, millisecond-duration radio transients. A significant fraction of repeating FRBs are found in magneto-active environments significantly different from typical interstellar medium, offering important insights into their origins and evolutionary pathways. Possible explanations range from companion winds to young magneto-active supernvae remnants. The spatial scales of the magneto-active environment is a major distinction of different models. In this work, we present a new method to estimate the physical scale of the magneto-active region surrounding FRBs by jointly analyzing measurements of temporal scattering ($τ_\mathrm{scat}$), depolarization ($σ_\mathrm{RM}$), and Faraday rotation measure (RM) variations ($\left|Δ\mathrm{RM}/Δt\right|$) in repeating sources. We systematically apply this method to all active repeaters with multiple RM measurements. Despite the coarse sampling and large uncertainties, the inferred distances tentatively favor SNR-scale magneto-environments for FRB 20190303A, FRB 20190417A, and FRB 20190520B, while still allowing binary-scale structures for FRB 20180916B and FRB 20201124A under plausible assumptions. Better sampling of propagation effects, together with future advances in simultaneous wideband measurements of multiple effects with CHORD and the DSA, has the potential to systematic discrimination among the origins of FRB magneto-environments and constrain progenitor evolution.