Dispersion Measure Variation of Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources

The repeating fast radio burst (FRB) 121102 was recently localized in a dwarf galaxy at a cosmological distance. The dispersion measure (DM) derived for each burst from FRB 121102 so far has not shown significant evolution, even though an apparent increase was recently seen with newly detected VLA bursts. It is expected that more repeating FRB sources may be detected in the future. In this work, we investigate a list of possible astrophysical processes that might cause DM variation of a particular FRB source. The processes include (1) the cosmological scale effects such as Hubble expansion and large-scale structure fluctuations; (2) the FRB local effects such as gas density fluctuation, expansion of a supernova remnant, a pulsar wind nebula, and an HII region; and (3) the propagation effect due to plasma lensing. We find that the DM variations contributed by the large-scale structure are extremely small, and any observable DM variation is likely caused by the plasma local to the FRB source. Besides mechanisms that produce decreasing DM with time, we suggest that an FRB source in an expanding supernova remnant around a nearly neutral ambient medium during the deceleration (Sedov-Taylor and snowplow) phases or in a growing HII region can introduce DM increasing. Some effects (e.g. an FRB source moving in an HII region or plasma lensing) can give either positive or negative DM variations. Future observations of DM variations of FRB 121102 and other repeating FRB sources can bring important clues for the physical origin of these sources.Comment: 12 pages. Accepted for publication in Ap

Searching for a stop-pair sample from top counting experiments at hadron colliders

The light stop pair if produced in hadron colliders and decaying through the likely decay chain stop->chargino + b followed by chargino->neutralino + f f', can mimic closely a top quark event when the mass of the stop is close to that of the top quark. Because of the much lower production rate, the stop event can be buried under the top quark event sample. In order to uncover the stop event, specific selection cuts need to be applied. Through Monte Carlo simulation with suitable kinematic cuts, we found that such stop event can be extracted from the top quark sample and detected by the top quark counting experiments in the upcoming upgraded Tevatron and LHC. However, because of the small statistics of the Run 1 of the Tevatron, the stop signal remains hidden at Run 1.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure