paper

Limits on Fast Radio Bursts from Four Years of the V-FASTR Experiment

arXiv:1605.07606 · doi:10.3847/0004-637X/826/2/223

Abstract

The V-FASTR experiment on the Very Long Baseline Array was designed to detect dispersed pulses of milliseconds duration, such as fast radio bursts (FRBs). We use all V-FASTR data through February 2015 to report V-FASTR's upper limits on the rates of FRBs, and compare these with re-derived rates from Parkes FRB detection experiments. V-FASTR's operation at lambda=20 cm allows direct comparison with the 20 cm Parkes rate, and we derive a power-law limit of γ<-0.4 (95% confidence limit) on the index of FRB source counts, N(>S)\propto S^γ. Using the previously measured FRB rate and the unprecedented amount of survey time spent searching for FRBs at a large range of wavelengths (0.3 cm > λ> 90 cm), we also place frequency-dependent limits on the spectral distribution of FRBs. The most constraining frequencies place two-point spectral index limits of α_{20cm}^{4cm} < 5.8 and α_{90cm}^{20cm} > -7.6, where fluence F \propto f^αif we assume true the burst rate reported by Champion et al. (2016) of R(F~0.6 Jy ms) = 7 x 10^3 sky^{-1} day^{-1} (for bursts of ~3 ms duration). This upper limit on αsuggests that if FRBs are extragalactic but non-cosmological, that on average they are not experiencing excessive free-free absorption due to a medium with high optical depth (assuming temperature ~8,000 K), which excessively invert their low-frequency spectrum. This in turn implies that the dispersion of FRBs arises in either or both of the intergalactic medium or the host galaxy, rather than from the source itself.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

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