Reconstruction of Reionization History through Dispersion Measure of Fast Radio Bursts

Abstract

In this paper, we study the evolution of the ionization fraction $x_e(z)$ during the epoch of reionization by using the dispersion measurements (DMs) of fast radio bursts (FRBs). Different from the previous studies, here we turn to consider the large-scale clustering information of observed DMs of FRB catalog, which only needs the rough redshift distribution, instead of the exact redshift information of each FRB. Firstly, we consider the instantaneous ``\texttt{tanh}'' model for $x_e(z)$ and find that including the auto-correlation information of the mock catalog, about $10^4$ FRBs with the intrinsic DM scatter of 100 $pc/c{\mathrm{m}}^3$ spanning 20\% of all sky, could significantly improve the constraint on the width ${\Delta }_z$ of the model, when comparing with that from the CMB data alone. The evolution shape of the ionization fraction will be tightly narrowed, namely the duration of the epoch of reionization has been shrunk, $z_{\mathrm{dur}}<2.24$ (95\% C.L.). Furthermore, we also use another redshift-asymmetric reionization model and obtain that the FRB mock catalog could measure the ionization fraction at $z=6$ precisely with the $1\sigma$ error $\Delta x_e(z=6)=0.012$, which means that the large-scale clustering information of observed DMs of FRB catalog is very sensitive to the ionization fraction of the end of reionization epoch. We conclude that the observation of high-redshift FRBs could be a complementary probe to study the reionization history in the future.

version accepted for publication in JCAP

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• Reconstruction of Baryon Fraction in Intergalactic Medium through Dispersion Measurements of Fast Radio Bursts
• Joint inference on the redshift distribution of fast radio burst and on the intergalactic baryon content