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Debiasing the Observed Fast Radio Burst Population with the CHIME/FRB Selection Function

K McGregor, JWT Hessels, VM Kaspi, K Shin… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2026 - arxiv.org
Astrophysics paper astro-ph.HE Suggest

… We incorporate this selection function into a simulationbased inference framework to … Using simulation-based inference, we constrained the slope of the high-τ tail and …

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@article{2606.26334v1,
Author        = {Kyle McGregor and Jason W. T. Hessels and Victoria M. Kaspi and Kaitlyn Shin and Fengqiu A. Dong and Naman Jain and Robert A. Main and Mawson W. Sammons and Michele Woodland and Daniel Amouyal and Derek Bingham and Charanjot Brar and Amanda M. Cook and Radu Craiu and Alice P. Curtin and Gwendolyn Eadie and Bryan M. Gaensler and Jeff Huang and Afrokk Khan and Calvin Leung and Kiyoshi W. Masui and Ayush Pandhi and Swarali Shivraj Patil and Aaron B. Pearlman and Sachin Pradeep E. T. and Paul Scholz and Seth R. Siegel and Kendrick Smith and David C. Stenning},
Title         = {Debiasing the Observed Fast Radio Burst Population with the CHIME/FRB Selection Function},
Eprint        = {2606.26334v1},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass  = {astro-ph.HE},
Abstract      = {The recent release of CHIME/FRB Catalog~2 provides the largest sample to date with which to investigate the intrinsic distributions of fast radio bursts (FRBs). Leveraging an expanded campaign of 587,367 synethetic bursts injected into the live CHIME/FRB search pipeline, we perform a population analysis of the fluence, scattering timescale, pulse width, and dispersion measure distributions of Catalog~2 FRBs. We first infer the intrinsic population using a resampling-based framework that accounts for instrumental selection effects following previous CHIME/FRB population studies. A central goal of this work is to constrain the intrinsic distribution of scattering timescales, that remained weakly constrained in Catalog~1 owing to limited statistics at moderate and large scattering times ($τ\gtrsim 10\,\mathrm{ms}$ at 600~MHz) and sparse injection coverage in this regime. Second, we construct an explicit multidimensional selection function by training a logistic regression model on the injected events. This model estimates the detection probability as a function of FRB observable properties, including higher-order interaction terms. We incorporate this selection function into a simulation-based inference framework to refine the inferred intrinsic scattering-timescale distribution. We find evidence for a slight downturn in the intrinsic FRB scattering timescale distribution, though a flat or slightly rising distribution cannot be ruled out, that is further supported through a comparison with the higher-frequency scattering timescale distribution observed by Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) survey.},
Year          = {2026},
Month         = {Jun},
Url           = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26334v1},
File          = {2606.26334v1.pdf}
}

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