Long-term magnetar bursting duty cycle

Determine the long-term activity duty cycle of magnetar bursting activity in order to break the degeneracy among magnetic field strength, radio conversion efficiency, and duty cycle in magnetic-energy models of repeating fast radio bursts.

Background

The framework relates the observed burst rate to the magnetar magnetic field strength, the fraction of magnetic dissipation converted into radio emission, and the activity duty cycle. Because observations cover only a small interval relative to the Hall-evolution timescale, the instantaneous burst rate may differ substantially from the long-term average. The authors therefore treat the duty cycle as a free parameter in principle and adopt a conservative minimum value for their constraints, leaving its actual value unresolved.

References

In practice, however, neither theoretical models nor existing observational data are currently sufficient to determine the duty cycle $D$ of magnetar burst activity.

— A Bayesian Framework for Constraining Magnetar Magnetic Fields from Repeating FRB Statistics  (2608.26857 - Deng et al., 27 Aug 2026) in Section 3.1, “Linking the Magnetic Energy Dissipation to FRB Burst Statistics”