Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a unique high-energy astrophysical phenomenon that are produced in extreme environments. Since their discovery in 2007, thousands have been detected, with most of them being extragalactic, while one repeating source resides in the Milky Way. Recent and proposed work establishes them as useful probes of cosmology and galaxy evolution processes at high redshift, but these often require large number statistics. I will discuss that this necessitates the assessment of how many FRBs are actually observable over the full sky, as well as how they evolve with redshift. Their evolution with redshift is also determined by their progenitor formation channels, which can either track star formation rate, or the stellar mass density. I will first discuss how we constrain the cosmic evolution of the star formation rate density, especially at high redshifts with published JWST results. Then I will talk about constraining the FRB luminosity (energy) function as well their tentative spectrum, which is somewhat analogous to how redshift evolution of galaxies is determined. All of these components give us a theoretical model of FRB source count evolution with redshift, which needs to be converted to a quantity called the Dispersion Measure (DM), which gives the column density of free electrons, and is also an FRB observable. I will talk about this conversion using Monte Carlo sampling of estimated DMs contributed by the IGM and FRB host galaxies, to build a theoretical FRB DM distribution which is matched with the observed DM distribution from the CHIME radio telescope’s FRB catalog. Finally, I will discuss some correlations in the model parameters that leave them unconstrained, and the possibility of resolving them with fluence data from the new CHIME baseband catalog. Once resolved, the luminosity function can inform FRB physics providing constraints to the energy emission limits, and the redshift evolution can maybe resolve the progenitor formation channel debate.