Searching for Gravitational Waves with Strongly Lensed Repeating Fast Radio Bursts

TL;DR

This paper explores how precisely timed, strongly lensed repeating Fast Radio Bursts can be used to detect long wavelength gravitational waves, offering a novel method for probing cosmological gravitational wave sources.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach utilizing the timing of strongly lensed repeating FRBs to search for gravitational waves, which is sensitive to sources near the FRB host galaxy.

Findings

Timing of lensed FRBs can detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries.

Combining FRB timing with pulsar timing arrays enhances gravitational wave detection.

Strongly lensed FRBs provide a unique probe of cosmological gravitational wave sources.

Abstract

Since their serendipitous discovery, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have garnered a great deal of attention from both observers and theorists. A new class of radio telescopes with wide fields of view have enabled a rapid accumulation of FRB observations, confirming that FRBs originate from cosmological distances. The high occurrence rate of FRBs and the development of new instruments to observe them create opportunities for FRBs to be utilized for a host of astrophysical and cosmological studies. We focus on the rare, and as yet undetected, subset of FRBs that undergo repeated bursts and are strongly gravitationally lensed by intervening structure. An extremely precise timing of burst arrival times is possible for strongly lensed repeating FRBs, and we show how this timing precision enables the search for long wavelength gravitational waves, including those sourced by supermassive black hole binary systems. The timing of burst arrival for strongly lensed repeating FRBs is sensitive to gravitational wave sources near the FRB host galaxy, which may lie at cosmological distances and would therefore be extremely challenging to detect by other means. Timing of strongly lensed FRBs can also be combined with pulsar timing array data to search for correlated time delays characteristic of gravitational waves passing through the Earth.