Towards Solving the Fast Radio Burst Enigma: Probability of Event Chance Coincidence for Inhomogeneous Noisy Spatial Point Processes.

Metro Toronto Convention Centre 

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, bright, extragalactic radio flashes of unknown physical origin. Some FRB sources exhibit repeat bursts, that is, multiple bursts consistent with being emitted from the same physical source. CHIME/FRB (the FRB backend of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Experiment) has increased the total number of FRB detections by an order of magnitude with our teams latest catalog release of 536 FRBs. As we run our experiment for longer and our number of FRB detection grows, however, the probability of identifying two or more FRB sources within a typical localization region becomes non-negligible. A question of great importance is then, for a given repeater candidate, what is the probability that each of the bursts in the cluster are physically unrelated to one another (i.e., that they coincided by chance)? In this project, our collaborative research team is working to develop and predict an estimate of the chance coincidence probability of multiple FRBs in the case of a noisy and inhomogeneous spatial point process.