Prospects of detecting fast radio bursts using Indian radio telescopes

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are short duration highly energetic dispersed radio pulses. We developed a generic formalism (Bera et al. 2016, MNRAS, 457, 2530) to estimate the FRB detection rate for any radio telescope with given parameters. By using this model, we estimated the FRB detection rate for two Indian radio telescope; the Ooty Wide Field Array (OWFA) (Bhattacharyya et al. 2017, J. Astrophys. Astr., 38, 17) and the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) (Bhattacharyya et al. 2018, J. Astrophys. Astr.) with three beam-forming modes. Here, we summarize these two works. We considered the energy spectrum of FRBs as a power law and the energy distribution of FRBs as a Dirac delta function and a Schechter luminosity function. We also considered two scattering models proposed by Bhat et al. (2004, Astrophys. J. Suppl. Series, 206, 1) and Macquart & Koay (2013, ApJ, 776, 125) for these works and we consider FRB pulse without scattering as a special case. We found that the future prospects of detecting FRBs by using these two Indian radio telescopes is good. They are capable to detect a significant number of FRBs per day. According to our prediction, we can detect $\sim 10^5{-}10^8$, $\sim 10^3{-}10^6$ and $\sim 10^5{-}10^7$ FRBs per day by using OWFA, commensal systems of GMRT and uGMRT respectively. Even a non detection of the predicted events will be very useful in constraining FRB properties.