Estimating Cosmological Parameters from Localized Fast Radio Bursts: A Method for Removing Milky Way Dispersion-Measure Contributions
Yuchen Zhang, Yang Liu, Hongwei Yu, Puxun Wu
astro-ph.CO, gr-qc
Submitted: 2026-06-29
Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 table
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are emerging as powerful probes for cosmology.
Terminology
Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are emerging as powerful probes for cosmology. However, cosmological inference based on FRB dispersion measures (DMs) is limited by uncertainties in the Milky Way contribution, including those from the Galactic interstellar medium and the Galactic halo. In this Letter, we propose a method that eliminates the Milky Way contribution by using DM differences between localized FRBs within the same sky region. The method removes the need to adopt a specific Galactic electron-density model or a prior assumption for the Galactic halo DM. We validate the reliability of the method using mock FRB samples and show that it successfully recovers the fiducial cosmological parameter. Applying the method to current localized FRB data, we obtain a constraint on b H 0 f d that differs from that inferred using the conventional treatment of the Milky Way contribution. This difference highlights the importance of Milky Way DM systematics in FRB cosmology and demonstrates the potential of differential DM methods for future large samples of localized FRBs.
Sources
- A fast radio burst from the first 3 billion years of the Universe
- NE2001.I. A New Model for the Galactic Distribution of Free Electrons and its Fluctuations
- Ray-tracing Fast Radio Bursts Through IllustrisTNG: Cosmological Dispersion Measures from Redshift 0 to 5.5
- Estimating the baryon fraction in the IGM from well-localized FRBs and DESI data
- The impact of FRB dispersion measure probability distribution functions on cosmographic estimates
- Dispersion Measure Distribution of Unlocalized Fast Radio Bursts as a Probe of the Hubble Constant
- Constraining the Baryon Fraction in Extragalactic Diffuse Ionized Gas with 124 Localized Fast Radio Bursts
- Constraints on Axion-Photon Mixing from Fast Radio Burst Dispersion Measures
- Fast Radio Bursts as cosmological proxies: estimating the Hubble constant
- Great Walls of Cosmic Baryons in the Northern Sky
- Tight bounds on the Maxwell-Carroll-Field-Jackiw parameters using Fast Radio Bursts
- Constraints on the baryon density from fast radio bursts using a non-parametric reconstruction of the Hubble parameter
- Cosmographic constraints from late-time probes including fast radio bursts
- Probing the Bias of Large-Scale Structure with Unlocalized Fast Radio Bursts
- Measurement of angular cross-correlation between the cosmological dispersion measure and the thermal Sunyaev--Zeldovich effect
- Cosmic baryon census with fast radio bursts and gravitational waves
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