Speaker
Description
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are an extremely luminous class of very short (millisecond-duration) bursts of radio waves, which are mostly extragalactic. Despite radio telescopes such as the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detecting thousands of FRBs, their origins and production mechanisms are largely unknown. Their only known source association is with an X-ray flare from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154. Beyond this, many models have been proposed for the production of FRBs by various source classes, including not only pulsars but also cataclysmic phenomena such as compact object mergers. Searching for neutrinos associated with FRBs can help constrain their production mechanism. Namely, the detection of neutrinos would be strong evidence for hadronic processes. I will present IceCube’s most recent search for neutrinos from FRBs, based on CHIME/FRB Catalog 2. This analysis is the largest search to date for neutrinos from FRBs, by more than two orders of magnitude in the number of bursts searched.
