Prospects of strongly lensed fast radio bursts: Simultaneous measurement of post-Newtonian parameter and Hubble constant

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of strongly lensed fast radio bursts (FRBs) to simultaneously measure the Hubble constant and the post-Newtonian parameter with high precision, using simulations of upcoming observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that lensed FRBs can be used to jointly estimate key cosmological and gravity parameters with significant accuracy, highlighting their utility for fundamental physics.

Findings

H_0 can be measured to about 1.5% precision.

The post-Newtonian parameter gamma_PPN can be constrained to about 8.7%.

Approximately 10 lensed FRBs are expected to be detected in several years.

Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing effect is a powerful tool to probe cosmological models and gravity theories. Recently, the time-delay cosmography from strong lensing and the stellar kinematics of the deflector, which encode the Hubble constant and the post-Newtonian parameter via two distance ratios reflecting the lensing mass and dynamical mass respectively, have been proposed to investigate these two parameters simultaneously. Among strong lensing systems with different sources, strongly lensed fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been proposed as precision probes of the universe since the time delay $\sim$ 10 days between images could be measured extremely precisely because of their short duration of a few milliseconds. In this work, we investigate the ability of strongly lensed FRBs on simultaneously estimating these two parameters via simulations. Take the expected FRB detection rate of upcoming facilities and lensing probability into consideration, it is likely to accumulate 10 lensed FRBs in several years and we find that $H_0$ could be determined to a $\sim1.5\%$ precision and $\gamma_{\rm PPN}$ could be constrained to a $\sim8.7\%$ precision simultaneously from them. These simultaneous estimations will be helpful for properly reflecting the possible correlation between these two fundamental parameters.