Paper detail

Constraining Primordial Black Holes using Fast Radio Burst Gravitational-Lens Interferometry with CHIME/FRB

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) represent an exciting frontier in the study of gravitational lensing, due to their brightness, extragalactic nature, and the compact, coherent characteristics of their emission. In a companion work [Kader, Leung+2022], we use a novel interferometric method to search for gravitationally lensed FRBs in the time domain using bursts detected by CHIME/FRB. There, we dechannelize and autocorrelate electric field data at a time resolution of 1.25 ns. This enables a search for FRBs whose emission is coherently deflected by gravitational lensing around a foreground compact object such as a primordial black hole (PBH). Here, we use our non-detection of lensed FRBs to place novel constraints on the PBH abundance outside the Local Group. We use a novel two-screen model to take into account decoherence from scattering screens in our constraints. Our constraints are subject to a single astrophysical model parameter -- the effective distance between an FRB source and the scattering screen, for which we adopt a fiducial distance of 1 parsec. We find that coherent FRB lensing is a sensitive probe of sub-solar mass compact objects. Having observed no lenses in $172$ bursts from $114$ independent sightlines through the cosmic web, we constrain the fraction of dark matter made of compact objects, such as PBHs, to be $f \lesssim 0.8$, if their masses are $\sim 10^{-3} M_{\odot}$.