Gamma-ray and Optical Observations of Repeating Fast Radio Bursts with VERITAS

TL;DR

This paper reports on VERITAS's multi-year observational campaign to detect optical and very-high-energy counterparts to repeating fast radio bursts, including simultaneous observations with CHIME, aiming to understand their emission mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents new observational results from VERITAS targeting five repeating FRBs, including simultaneous optical and VHE data, advancing multi-wavelength studies of these phenomena.

Findings

No VHE or optical counterparts detected during observations.

Simultaneous observations with CHIME provide constraints on emission models.

Results help refine theoretical models of FRB emission mechanisms.

Abstract

Fast radio burst (FRBs) are an exciting class of bright, extragalactic, millisecond radio transients. The recent development of large field-of-view (FOV) radio telescopes has caused a rapid rise in the number of identified single burst and repeating FRBs. This has allowed for the extensive multi-wavelength follow-up to search for the potential counterparts predicted by theoretical models. New observations of similar radio transients in Galactic magnetars like SGR 1935+2154 have continued to motivate the search for rapid optical and very-high-energy (VHE, >100 GeV) counterparts. Since 2016 VERITAS has engaged in an FRB observing campaign to search for the prompt optical, and VHE emission from multiple repeating FRBs. We present these new results from VERITAS observations of five repeating sources including data taken simultaneously with bursts observed by the CHIME radio telescope.