The Role of Scintillation in Detecting HI Absorption in FRB Spectra

The 21-cm absorption line of neutral hydrogen has been a long hypothesized observational feature of the spectra of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The difficulties associated with detector noise in extracting HI absorption have been previously studied. We test the role that scintillation plays in the HI absorption line's detectability, and characterize the regimes where a realistic FRB may yield the 21-cm line. We build an efficient model to simulate diffractive scintillation arising from FRB passage through a thin scattering screen. We find that the absorption profile is detectable in a scintillation-dominated high signal-to-noise spectrum if the scintillation decorrelation bandwidth differs significantly in scale from the width of the absorption profile. Active repeaters also enable favorable conditions as the absorption signal improves when repeat bursts are stacked. Repeat bursts must be separated in time by more than the diffractive scintillation timescale, otherwise flux modulations with frequency are correlated. By cross-referencing repeating FRB positions with an observational catalog of Milky Way molecular clouds detected in CO, we find that the sightline to FRB 20180916B may intersect a Galactic molecular cloud. For currently operating and planned sensitive telescopes, the presence of both scintillation and noise requires 1000 bursts to be stacked to detect the HI absorption line at a 5 sigma significance. Improvement in detector sensitivities will help probe HI clouds intersected by FRBs in the host or intervening galaxies, or in high-redshift minihalos.