Modeling Current and Future High-cadence Surveys of Repeating Fast Radio Burst Populations

Abstract

In recent years, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) interferometer has revealed a large number of fast radio bursts (FRBs), including a sizable population that demonstrates repeating behavior. This transit facility, employing a real-time FRB search pipeline, continually scans the sky with declinations between −10° and 90° for events with fluences ⪆0.4 Jy ms. We simulate a population of repeating FRBs by performing Monte Carlo simulations of underlying source populations processed through a mock CHIME/FRB observing pipeline. Assuming intrinsic repeater rates follow a Poisson distribution, we test assumptions about the burst populations of the repeater sample, and construct models of the FRB sample assuming various cosmological distributions. We infer the completeness of CHIME/FRB observations as a function of observing cadence and redshifts out to 0.5. We find that, if all simulated bursts have a fixed Poisson probability of repetition over their integrated time of observation, repeating burst detections across comoving volume should continue to grow near linearly on the order of decades. We predict that around 170 of the current CHIME/FRB one-off sources will ultimately repeat. We also make projections for FRB repeaters by future facilities and demonstrate that the number of repeaters they find could saturate on a ∼3 yr timescale.

Keywords

• Radio transient sources