Sunil Simha

Talk: Sunil Simha, 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Cosmic accountancy: Baryon budgeting using FRB dispersion measures
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are being detected and precisely localized (~<1’’) at an accelerating pace due to the efforts of several FRB experiments worldwide. Chief among these is the CHIME telescope and its outriggers, which are well on their way to localizing over 200 events a year! With precise localization comes a secure host association and thus distances or redshifts, zFRB, to these FRBs. While the combination of FRB dispersion measures (DMs) and zFRB itself contains information about the total column of ionized gas in the foreground universe, it is agnostic to its location. However, with additional information about the foreground, FRB DMs can indeed become powerful tools to constrain the matter distribution in halos, the intergalactic medium (IGM), and perhaps even shed light on the origin of the bursts themselves. In my talk, I shall elucidate the ongoing efforts of the FLIMFLAM survey to precisely constrain the baryon partition between halos and the IGM. I shall also talk about some of our latest work on the IFU observations of a nearby (<100 Mpc) FRB host and how they can part the clouds of the host interstellar medium and potentially yield insights on the circum-burst medium of the FRB.