A comparison between repeating bursts of FRB 121102 and giant pulses from Crab pulsar and its applications

TL;DR

This study compares the energy distributions of repeating FRB 121102 and Crab pulsar giant pulses, finding similar power-law slopes and supporting a super GPs model involving a millisecond pulsar as a plausible explanation.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of energy distributions between repeating FRBs and pulsar giant pulses, supporting the super GPs model over magnetar models for FRB 121102.

Findings

Energy distribution slopes are similar for FRB 121102 and Crab GPs.

FRB 121102's energy distribution fits a broken power-law.

Super GPs model involving a millisecond pulsar is favored.

Abstract

There are some similarities between bursts of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) and giant pulses (GPs) of pulsars. To explore possible relations between them, we study the cumulative energy distributions of these two phenomena using the observations of repeating FRB 121102 and the GPs of Crab pulsar. We find that the power-law slope of GPs (with fluence $\geq$130 Jy ms) is $2.85\pm0.10$. The energy distribution of FRB 121102 can be well fitted by a smooth broken power-law function. For the bursts of FRB 121102 above the break energy (1.22 $\times 10^{37}$ erg), the best-fitting slope is $2.90_{-0.44}^{+0.55}$, similar to the index of GPs at the same observing frequency ($\sim$1.4 GHz). We further discuss the physical origin of the repeating FRB 121102 in the framework of the super GPs model. And we find that the super GPs model involving a millisecond pulsar is workable and favored for explaining FRB 121102 despite that the magnetar burst model is more popular.