Reconstruction of Baryon Fraction in Intergalactic Medium through Dispersion Measurements of Fast Radio Bursts

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) probe the total column density of free electrons in the intergalactic medium (IGM) along the path of propagation though the dispersion measures (DMs) which depend on the baryon mass fraction in the IGM, i.e., $f_{\mathrm{IGM}}$. In this letter, we investigate the large-scale clustering information of DMs to study the evolution of $f_{\mathrm{IGM}}$. When combining with the Planck 2018 measurements, we could give tight constraints on the evolution of $f_{\mathrm{IGM}}(z)$ from about $10^4$ FRBs with the intrinsic DM scatter of $30(1+z)pc/c{\mathrm{m}}^3$ spanning 80% of the sky and redshift range $z=0-3$. Firstly, we consider the Taylor expansion of $f_{\mathrm{IGM}}(z)$ up to second order, and find that the mean relative standard deviation $\sigma (f_{\mathrm{IGM}})\equiv ⟨\sigma [f_{\mathrm{IGM}}(z)]/f_{\mathrm{IGM}}(z)⟩$ is about 7.2%. In order to alleviate the dependence on fiducial model, we also adopt a non-parametric methods in this work, the local principle component analysis. We obtain the consistent, but weaker constraints on the evolution of $f_{\mathrm{IGM}}(z)$, namely the mean relative standard deviation $\sigma (f_{\mathrm{IGM}})$ is 24.2%. With the forthcoming surveys, this could be a complimentary method to investigate the baryon mass fraction in the IGM.

Eq.(13) has been corrected

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Cosmology with fast radio bursts in the era of SKA
• An 8.0\% Determination of the Baryon Fraction in the Intergalactic Medium from Localized Fast Radio Bursts
• Probing the interaction between dark energy and dark matter with future fast radio burst observations
• Cosmological model-independent constraints on the baryon fraction in the IGM from fast radio bursts and supernovae data
• On the double-plane plasma lensing
• Combining strongly lensed and unlensed fast radio bursts: To be a more precise late-universe probe
• Constraints on the Helium Abundance from Fast Radio Bursts