Polarization properties of 128 non-repeating fast radio bursts from the first CHIME/FRB baseband catalog (2401.17378v2)

Abstract: We present a 400-800 MHz polarimetric analysis of 128 non-repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) from the first CHIME/FRB baseband catalog, increasing the total number of FRB sources with polarization properties by a factor of ~3. 89 FRBs have >6${\sigma}$ linearly polarized detections, 29 FRBs fall below this significance threshold and are deemed linearly unpolarized, and for 10 FRBs the polarization data are contaminated by instrumental polarization. For the 89 polarized FRBs, we find Faraday rotation measure (RM) amplitudes, after subtracting approximate Milky Way contributions, in the range 0.5-1160 rad m$^{-2}$ with a median of 53.8 rad m$^{-2}$. Most non-repeating FRBs in our sample have RMs consistent with Milky Way-like host galaxies and their linear polarization fractions range from <10% to 100% with a median of 63%. We see marginal evidence that non-repeating FRBs have more constraining lower limits than repeating FRBs for the host electron-density-weighted line-of-sight magnetic field strength. We classify the non-repeating FRB polarization position angle (PA) profiles into four archetypes: (i) single component with constant PA (57% of the sample), (ii) single component with variable PA (10%), (iii) multiple components with a single constant PA (22%), and (iv) multiple components with different or variable PAs (11%). We see no evidence for population-wide frequency-dependent depolarization and, therefore, the spread in the distribution of fractional linear polarization is likely intrinsic to the FRB emission mechanism. Finally, we present a novel method to derive redshift lower limits for polarized FRBs without host galaxy identification and test this method on 20 FRBs with independently measured redshifts.