Abstract:
I report on recent progress to understand the nature of fast radio bursts. Most properties are inferred through propagation effects, including dispersion, scattering, scintillation, and rotation measure. I will review the issues, survey some of the proposed candidates ranging from terrestrial to cosmological, and conclude with prospects for the near future.
Brief Bio:
Prof. Pen is a world renowned cosmologist, working on a wide variety of topics ranging from cosmic string and topological defects, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich simulations, gravitational lensing, cosmic reionization and MHD simulations. He is also an expert on numerical simulation techniques and parallel computing. He was a NTU undergrad in math, obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1995, and was a Harvard University Junior Fellow before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto and the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) in 1998. He is currently a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research senior fellow and the associate director of CITA. Recently his research is focused on cosmological applications of the hydrogen hyperfine transition 21-cm line, and pulsar scattering phenomena.