A comparison between repeating bursts of FRB 121102 and giant pulses from Crab pulsar and its applications

Abstract

There are some similarities between bursts of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) and giant pulses (GPs) of pulsars. To explore possible relations between them, we study the cumulative energy distributions of these two phenomena using the observations of repeating FRB 121102 and the GPs of Crab pulsar. We find that the power-law slope of GPs (with fluence≥130 Jy·ms) is 2.85±0.10. The energy distribution of FRB 121102 can be well fitted by a smooth broken power-law function. For the bursts of FRB 121102 above the break energy (1.22 ×10³⁷ erg), the best-fitting slope is {2.90}_{-0.44}^{+0.55}, similar to the index of GPs at the same observing frequency (∼1.4 GHz). We further discuss the physical origin of the repeating FRB 121102 in the framework of the super GPs model. And we find that the super GPs model involving a millisecond pulsar is workable and favored for explaining FRB 121102 despite that the magnetar burst model is more popular.

Keywords

pulsars / radio sources / general-methods: statistical

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