Discovery of Bimodal Drift Rate Structure in FRB 20240114A: Evidence for Dual Emission Regions

TL;DR

This study uncovers a bimodal distribution in the drift rates of upward-drifting bursts from FRB 20240114A, indicating two potentially spatially separated emission regions with distinct physical properties.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel analysis revealing bimodal drift rate structure in FRB bursts using unsupervised machine learning, supporting the dual-region emission hypothesis.

Findings

Identified a distinct high-drift subpopulation with 2.5 times higher drift rates.

Confirmed bimodality persists within single-component burst clusters.

High-drift bursts have lower peak frequencies and shorter durations.

Abstract

We report the discovery of bimodal structure in the drift rate distribution of upward-drifting burst clusters from the hyperactive repeating fast radio burst FRB 20240114A. Using unsupervised machine learning (UMAP dimensionality reduction combined with HDBSCAN density-based clustering) applied to 233 upward-drifting burst clusters from the FAST telescope dataset, we identify a distinct subpopulation of 45 burst clusters (Cluster C1) with mean drift rates 2.5x higher than typical upward-drifting burst clusters (245.6 vs 98.1 MHz/ms). Gaussian mixture modeling reveals strong evidence for bimodality (delta-BIC = 296.6), with clearly separated modes (Ashman's D = 2.70 > 2) and a statistically significant gap in the distribution (11.3 sigma). Crucially, we demonstrate that this bimodality persists when restricting the analysis to single-component (U1) burst clusters only (delta-BIC = 19.9, Ashman's D = 2.71), confirming that the result is not an artifact of combining single- and multi-component burst clusters with different drift rate definitions. The extreme-drift subpopulation also exhibits systematically lower peak frequencies (-7%), shorter durations (-29%), and distinct clustering in multi-dimensional feature space. These findings are suggestive of two spatially separated emission regions in the magnetosphere, each producing upward-drifting burst clusters with distinct physical characteristics, although confirmation requires observations from additional epochs and sources.