Coherent emission in fast radio bursts

The fast (ms) radio bursts reported by Lorimer et al. Science 318, 777 (2007) and Thornton et al. Science 341, 53 (2013) have extremely high brightness temperatures if at the inferred cosmological distances. This implies coherent emission by “bunches” of charges. Fast radio bursts, like the giant pulses of the Crab pulsar, display banded spectra that may be harmonics of plasma frequency emission by plasma turbulence and are inconsistent with emission by charge distributions moving relativistically. We model the emission region as a screen of half-wave dipole radiators resonant around the frequencies of observation, the maximally bright emission mechanism of nonrelativistic charges, and calculate the implied charge bunching. From this we infer the minimum electron energy required to overcome electrostatic repulsion. If fast radio bursts are the counterparts of Galactic events, their Galactic counterparts may be detected from any direction above the horizon by radio telescopes in their far sidelobes or by small arrays of dipoles.