A 4200-hour HyperFlash and \'ECLAT campaign on the hyperactive FRB 20240114A: constraining energetics with the most brilliant bursts

TL;DR

This extensive 4200-hour campaign on FRB 20240114A revealed high-energy bursts, emphasizing the importance of the brightest events in the source's energy budget and providing insights into the source's environment and energetics.

Contribution

The paper presents the longest high-cadence observation campaign of an FRB, detecting numerous energetic bursts and analyzing their energy distribution and evolution.

Findings

Detected 178 high-energy bursts over 806 days.

The brightest burst, STROOP, accounts for about one-third of total energy.

Identified a break in the burst energy distribution at ~2×10^{40} erg.

Abstract

Hyperactive repeaters provide a unique window into the evolving environments and energy budgets of fast radio burst (FRB) sources, though they may not be representative of the FRB population in general. High-cadence observations are key to capturing the rarest and most energetic bursts, which occur only once per hundreds to thousands of hours. Here we present an unprecedented $4{,}200$-hour observing campaign targeting FRB 20240114A as part of the HyperFlash and \'ECLAT FRB monitoring programs. Over $806$ days, we detected $178$ high-energy ($\sim$$10^{40-42}$ erg) bursts with HyperFlash, which together amount to $4.4 \times 10^{42}$ erg of released radio energy (assuming isotropic emission and 1-GHz emission bandwidth). The cumulative energy of the HyperFlash bursts is about twice that of $\sim$$11{,}000$ lower-energy bursts detected with FAST, emphasising the significant role that the highest-energy bursts play in depleting the central engine's stored energy. In fact, the single most brilliant burst from our sample, which we term the STROOP, contributes roughly $1/3$ of all the energy we measure, and is at the maximum energy seen in studies of both repeating and apparently one-off FRBs alike. We also find a break in the burst energy distribution at $\sim$$2\times10^{40}$ erg and a linear dispersion measure (DM) increase of $+0.96 \pm 0.06$ pc cm$^{-3}$ over a period of $318$ days. We discuss these findings in the context of a magnetar source model and highlight comparisons with the energetics of intermediate and giant X-ray/$\gamma$-ray flares from Galactic sources.