Reconstruction of reionization history through dispersion measurements of fast radio bursts

Abstract

In this paper, we study the evolution of the ionization fraction x e(z) during the epoch of reionization by using the dispersion measurements (DMs) of fast radio bursts (FRBs). Different from the previous studies, here we turn to consider the large-scale clustering information of observed DMs of FRB catalog, which only needs the rough redshift distribution, instead of the exact redshift information of each FRB. Firstly, we consider the instantaneous “tanh” model for x e(z) and find that including the auto-correlation information of the mock catalog, about 104 FRBs with the intrinsic DM scatter of 100 pc/cm3 spanning 20% of all sky, could significantly improve the constraint on the width Δz of the model, when comparing with that from the CMB data alone. The evolution shape of the ionization fraction will be tightly narrowed, namely the duration of the epoch of reionization has been shrunk, z dur < 2.24 (95% C.L.). Furthermore, we also use another redshift-asymmetric reionization model and obtain that the FRB mock catalog could measure the ionization fraction at z = 6 precisely with the 1σ error Δ x e (z = 6) = 0.012, which means that the large-scale clustering information of observed DMs of FRB catalog is very sensitive to the ionization fraction of the end of reionization epoch. We conclude that the observation of high-redshift FRBs could be a complementary probe to study the reionization history in the future.