Explaining fast radio bursts through Dicke's superradiance

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), characterized by strong bursts of radiation intensity at radio wavelengths lasting on the order of a millisecond, have yet to be firmly associated with a family, or families, of astronomical sources. It follows that despite the large number of proposed models no well-defined physical process has been identified to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we demonstrate how Dicke's superradiance, for which evidence has recently been found in the interstellar medium, can account for the characteristics associated to FRBs. Our analysis and modelling of previously detected FRBs suggest they could originate from regions in many ways similar to those known to harbor masers or megamasers, and result from the coherent radiation emanating from populations of molecules associated with large-scale entangled quantum mechanical states. We estimate this entanglement to involve as many as ~10^(30) to ~10^(32) molecules over distances spanning 100 to 1000 AU.

9 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in the MNRAS

References in corpus (7)

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• The Host Galaxy and Redshift of the Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Fast Radio Bursts
• Limit on the population of repeating fast radio bursts from the ASKAP/CRAFT lat50 survey
• A simple relationship for the spectro-temporal structure of bursts from FRB 121102
• Detection of Fast Radio Bursts on the Large Scanning Antenna of the Lebedev Physical Institute
• Astronomical masers and Dicke's superradiance
• Generalisation of the Menegozzi & Lamb Maser Algorithm to the Transient Superradiance Regime