Colloq Abstract - Connor
March 3, 2023
11:00am Mountain
Liam Connor (Caltech)
FRB Cosmology with the Deep Synoptic Array
Abstract
Since their discovery in 2007, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have held promise as a new cosmological probe. FRBs are brief, bright, and ubiquitous, with volumetric rates that exceed even core-collapse supernovae. As they travel through the Universe, information about the media in which they propagate is imprinted on the radio pulse, allowing us to study baryonic and dark matter on scales from parsecs to Gpc. I will highlight the most promising areas in FRB applications research, including studies of the circumgalactic medium and "coherent" gravitational lensing. I will then describe early results from Caltech/OVRO’s Deep Synoptic Array (DSA-110), which has more than doubled the known sample of localized FRBs in its first year of commissioning. We have begun probing the baryon content of massive halos with this initial sample. The final portion of my talk will describe the DSA-2000, a proposed “radio camera” that will lead to unprecedented advances in long-wavelength survey science, including FRB cosmology.
