Scintillation Timescales of Bright FRBs Detected by CHIME/FRB

TL;DR

This paper presents a pipeline to measure scintillation timescales of FRBs detected by CHIME/FRB, revealing that most observed scintillation can be explained by the Milky Way's interstellar medium.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new pipeline for analyzing scintillation in FRBs and applies it to CHIME/FRB data, demonstrating the Milky Way's role in observed scintillation.

Findings

Measured scintillation bandwidths of 4-100 kHz in 12 FRBs.

Detected scintillation timescales of 2-40 microseconds in 10 FRBs.

Strong correlation between observed scintillation timescales and NE2001 predictions.

Abstract

We describe a pipeline to measure scintillation in fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by CHIME/FRB in the 400-800 MHz band by analyzing the frequency structure of the FRB's spectrum. We use the pipeline to measure the characteristic frequency bandwidths of scintillation between $4-100$ kHz in 12 FRBs corresponding to timescales of $\sim$2-40 $\mu$s for 10 FRBs detected by CHIME/FRB. For the other two FRBs, we did not detect scintillation in the region our analysis is sensitive. We compared the measured scintillation timescales to the NE2001 predictions for the scintillation timescales from the Milky Way. We find a strong correlation to be an indication that in most instances, the observed scintillation of FRBs can be explained by the Milky Way.