Triggered superradiance and fast radio bursts

Abstract

In this paper we develop a model for fast radio bursts (FRBs) based on triggered superradiance (SR) and apply it to previously published data of FRB 110220 and FRB 121102. We show how a young pulsar located at ~100 pc or more from an SR/FRB system could initiate the onset of a powerful burst of radiation detectable over cosmological distances. Our models using the OH$^2\Pi_{3/2}$ $\left(J=3/2\right)$ 1612 MHz and $^2\Pi_{3/2}$ $\left(J=5/2\right)$ 6030 MHz spectral lines match the light curves well and suggest the entanglement of more than $10^{30}$ initially inverted molecules over lengths of approximately 300 au for a single SR sample. SR also accounts for the observed temporal narrowing of FRB pulses with increasing frequency for FRB 121102, and predicts a scaling of the FRB spectral bandwidth with the frequency of observation, which we found to be consistent with the existing data.