Recent advances in Fast Radio Burst studies from the CHIME/FRB telescope

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-timescale radio transients originating from cosmological distances (~Gpc) that have been discovered a little more than a decade ago. At these distances, they have to be a trillion times more luminous than the brightest radio pulses observed from Galactic pulsars. The engine and emission mechanism that can produce such luminosities is still unknown despite ~80 different theories. Over the past few years, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB backend has detected hundreds of FRBs including a dozen repeating FRBs and a few of the nearest FRB sources. The repeating nature of these FRBs, allows for precise localization with radio interferometers and a detailed study of their environment and nature with multi-wavelength observations. I will introduce the broad questions about the nature of FRBs and their promise as tools for cosmology. I will discuss recent results from the CHIME/FRB backend and the inferences that we can draw about the origins of FRBs. Apart from radio observations, I will discuss X-ray and optical studies of FRB locations and the search for prompt counterparts of FRBs. I will finish by discussing the ongoing efforts of the CHIME/FRB collaboration to build outrigger telescopes for FRB localization and indigenous plans for identifying the brightest and rarest FRBs using a ultra-wide field of view telescope.

Shriharsh Tendulkar obtained his B. Tech. in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay (2008), and his M.S. (2010) and Ph.D. (2014) in Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. After post-doctoral stints at the California Institute of Technology and McGill University, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics as a Reader in October 2020.