Revised constraints on the photon mass from well-localized fast radio bursts

TL;DR

This study uses well-localized fast radio bursts and Bayesian inference to set upper limits on the photon mass, accounting for dispersion measure uncertainties, but finds limited improvement with larger samples due to intergalactic medium uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides the tightest constraints on photon mass from FRBs by incorporating detailed DM distributions and Bayesian analysis, highlighting the impact of intergalactic medium uncertainties.

Findings

Photon mass constrained to <4.8×10⁻⁵¹ kg at 1σ

Adding more FRBs or higher redshift data does not significantly improve constraints

Uncertainty in intergalactic medium DM limits photon mass measurement precision

Abstract

We constrain the photon mass from well-localized fast radio bursts (FRBs) using Bayes inference method. The probability distributions of dispersion measures (DM) of host galaxy and intergalactic medium are properly taken into account. The photon mass is tightly constrained from 17 well-localized FRBs in the redshift range $0<z<0.66$. Assuming that there is no redshift evolution of host DM, the $1\sigma$ and $2\sigma$ upper limits of photon mass are constrained to be $m_\gamma<4.8\times 10^{-51}$ kg and $m_\gamma<7.1\times 10^{-51}$ kg, respectively. Monte Carlo simulations show that, even enlarging the FRB sample to 200 and extending the redshift range to $0<z<3$ couldn't significantly improve the constraining ability on photon mass. This is because of the large uncertainty on the DM of intergalactic medium.