Search for: All records

ABSTRACT One widely discussed mechanism to produce highly coherent radio emission of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is coherent emission by bunches, either via curvature radiation or inverse Compton scattering (ICS). It has been suggested that the plasma oscillation effect can significantly suppress coherent emission power by bunches. We examine this criticism in this paper. The suppression factor formalism was derived within the context of radio pulsars in which radio waves are in the low-amplitude, linear regime and cannot directly be applied to the large-amplitude, non-linear regime relevant for FRBs. Even if one applies this linear treatment, plasma suppression is not important for two physical reasons. First, for an efficient radiation mechanism, such as ICS, the required plasma density is not high so that a high-density plasma may not exist. Secondly, both bunched coherent mechanisms demand that a large global parallel electric field (E∥) must exist in the emission region in order to continuously inject energy to the bunches to power an FRB. In order to produce typical FRB duration via coherent curvature or ICS radiation, a parallel electric field must be present to balance the acceleration and radiation back reaction. The plasma suppression factor should be modified with the existence of E∥. We show that the correction factor for curvature radiation, fcur, increases with E∥ and becomes 1 when E∥ reaches the radiation-reaction-limited regime. We conclude that the plasma suppression effect can be ignored for realistic FRB emission models invoking bunched coherent radio emission. 

ABSTRACT At least some fast radio bursts (FRBs) are produced by magnetars. Even though mounting observational evidence points towards a magnetospheric origin of FRB emission, the question of the location for FRB generation continues to be debated. One argument suggested against the magnetospheric origin of bright FRBs is that the radio waves associated with an FRB may lose most of their energy before escaping the magnetosphere because the cross-section for e± to scatter large-amplitude electromagnetic waves in the presence of a strong magnetic field is much larger than the Thompson cross-section. We have investigated this suggestion and find that FRB radiation travelling through the open field line region of a magnetar’s magnetosphere does not suffer much loss due to two previously ignored factors. First, the plasma in the outer magnetosphere ($$r \gtrsim 10^9$$ cm), where the losses are potentially most severe, is likely to be flowing outwards at a high Lorentz factor γp ≥ 103. Secondly, the angle between the wave vector and the magnetic field vector, θB, in the outer magnetosphere is likely of the order of 0.1 radian or smaller due in part to the intense FRB pulse that tilts open magnetic field lines so that they get aligned with the pulse propagation direction. Both these effects reduce the interaction between the FRB pulse and the plasma substantially. We find that a bright FRB with an isotropic luminosity $$L_{\rm frb} \gtrsim 10^{42} \, {\rm erg \ s^{-1}}$$ can escape the magnetosphere unscathed for a large section of the γp − θB parameter space, and therefore conclude that the generation of FRBs in magnetar magnetosphere passes this test.