FRB Statistics in time and space: how to use statistics to study FRBs and the gas they travel through
Amanda Cook
McGill University

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have garnered a lot of interest in the astrophysics community not only because of the extreme physical processes implied by their high energies and ~millisecond durations, but also due to their potential as cosmological probes.   In this talk, I'll motivate two statistical studies of fast radio bursts (FRBs), the first focusing on constraining the Milky Way?s ionized halo and the second developing new spatial point process methodology for the identification of repeating FRBs. My FRB sample comes from the FRB project of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which has revolutionized the FRB field by detecting magnitudes more FRBs than any other instrument. The first question, 'how much ionized plasma is there in the Milky Way's halo?', is constrained using FRB dispersion measures and non-parametric boundary estimation. The second project introduces a novel approach to inference on noisy nonhomogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs), in particular describing the k-contact distribution for events in a noisy NHPP. We apply this to distinguish chance alignments of FRBs in R.A., Decl., and DM from real repeating sources. This approach has significantly increased sensitivity for identifying repeaters and I'll show some of the implications of this increased sample for the repeater population.

Date:	Jeudi, le 10 avril 2025
Heure:	11:00
Lieu:	Pour tous
	Pavillon MIL A-4502