High-redshift empirical test of the turboFRB dispersion-measure tail

Determine whether the empirical dispersion-measure tail of localized Fast Radio Bursts at \(z\gtrsim 2\) is closer to the broader turboFRB prediction or to the narrower corrected hydrodynamical Konietzka reference distribution.

Background

The paper compares turboFRB with a corrected IllustrisTNG ray-tracing benchmark and finds residual differences in the high-redshift tail, where the turboFRB distribution is broader than the Konietzka prediction. The single currently discussed localized event above z=2z=2 is insufficient to distinguish the two models empirically. A larger population of localized high-redshift FRBs is therefore needed to resolve which prediction better describes the observed dispersion-measure tail.

References

Second, with a single $z>2$ event we cannot empirically discriminate between the broader turboFRB prediction and the narrower Konietzka prediction at $z\gtrsim 2$, despite the fact that the Konietzka tail probability for the same event would be smaller. A population of localised $z>2$ FRBs will be required to test whether the empirical tail at high redshift is closer to the forward-model prediction or to the corrected hydrodynamical reference.

— A stochastic forward model for the intergalactic dispersion-measure distribution of Fast Radio Bursts  (2608.17658 - Fortunato et al., 18 Aug 2026) in Section 4, subsection “Representative events”