The effects of plasma on the magnification and time delay of strongly lensed fast radio bursts

Abstract

ABSTRACT The number of identified fast radio bursts (FRBs) will continue to increase rapidly with current and planned future facilities. Strongly lensed FRBs are also expected to be found, which can provide precise time delays and thus have rich applications in cosmology and fundamental physics. However, the radio signal of lensed FRBs will be deflected by the plasma in lens galaxies in addition to the deflection by gravity. Such deflections by both gravity and plasma will cause frequency-dependent time delays, which are different from the dispersion delay and the geometric delay caused by gravitational lensing. Depending on the lensing and plasma models, the frequency–time-delay relationship of the lensed images can show distinguishing behaviours either between the multiple images or from the dispersion relation. Such phenomena cannot be neglected in future studies, especially at low radio frequencies, as plasma exists in lens galaxies in general. More importantly, such information provides not only a potential way to search for lensed FRBs but also constraints on the mass and plasma distributions in lens galaxies. In particular, plasma may make the missing central images observable at low radio frequencies.