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Constraining primordial black holes using fast radio burst gravitational-lens interferometry with CHIME/FRB

  • Calvin Leung
  • , Zarif Kader
  • , Kiyoshi W. Masui
  • , Matt Dobbs
  • , Daniele Michilli
  • , Juan Mena-Parra
  • , Ryan McKinven
  • , Cherry Ng
  • , Kevin Bandura
  • , Mohit Bhardwaj
  • , Charanjot Brar
  • , Tomas Cassanelli
  • , Pragya Chawla
  • , Fengqiu Adam Dong
  • , Deborah Good
  • , Victoria Kaspi
  • , Adam E. Lanman
  • , Hsiu Hsien Lin
  • , Bradley W. Meyers
  • , Aaron B. Pearlman
  • Ue Li Pen, Emily Petroff, Ziggy Pleunis, Masoud Rafiei-Ravandi, Mubdi Rahman, Pranav Sanghavi, Paul Scholz, Kaitlyn Shin, Seth Siegel, Kendrick M. Smith, Ingrid Stairs, Shriharsh P. Tendulkar, Keith Vanderlinde
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • McGill University
  • University of Toronto
  • West Virginia University
  • University of Amsterdam
  • University of British Columbia
  • Academia Sinica - Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
  • Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
  • Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

41 Scopus citations

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) represent an exciting frontier in the study of gravitational lensing, due to their brightness, extragalactic nature, and the compact, coherent characteristics of their emission. In a companion work [43Z. Kader and C. Leung, Phys. Rev. D 106, 043016 (2022).PRVDAQ2470-0010], we use a novel interferometric method to search for gravitationally lensed FRBs in the time domain using bursts detected by CHIME/FRB. There, we dechannelize and autocorrelate electric field data at a time resolution of 1.25 ns. This enables a search for FRBs whose emission is coherently deflected by gravitational lensing around a foreground compact object such as a primordial black hole (PBH). Here, we use our nondetection of lensed FRBs to place novel constraints on the PBH abundance outside the Local Group. We use a novel two-screen model to take into account decoherence from scattering screens in our constraints. Our constraints are subject to a single astrophysical model parameter-The effective distance between an FRB source and the scattering screen, for which we adopt a fiducial distance of 1 pc. We find that coherent FRB lensing is a sensitive probe of sub-solar mass compact objects. Having observed no lenses in 172 bursts from 114 independent sightlines through the cosmic web, we constrain the fraction of dark matter made of compact objects, such as PBHs, to be fâ 0.8, if their masses are ∼10-3 M.

Original languageEnglish
Article number043017
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume106
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 15 2022

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