SEMINAR: Fast Radio Bursts at the Dawn of a Golden Era.
Guest : Shotaro Yamasaki
Title : Fast Radio Bursts at the Dawn of a Golden Era.
Date / Time : February 24, 2026, 13:
Location : FENS G035
Abstract: Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio transients from cosmological distances whose physical origins remain a mystery. With recent wide-field surveys, FRB research has entered a golden era in which large, homogeneous samples now allow statistically robust tests of long-standing questions: Are most FRBs intrinsically repeating? What controls burst emission properties? And how do progenitor environments shape the observed population? In this talk, I address these questions using theory-driven statistical approaches. First, using CHIME data, I show that the observed population of apparently non-repeating FRBs is consistent with weakly repeating sources, implying a high intrinsic repeater fraction and challenging the traditional repeater/non-repeater dichotomy. Second, focusing on repeating FRBs, I present time-frequency correlation analyses that reveal systematic spectral evolution in closely spaced burst pairs, providing new constraints on FRB emission mechanisms beyond single-burst analyses. Finally, I discuss host-galaxy metallicity studies of localized FRBs, demonstrating how progenitor environments can be statistically constrained and connected to population-level properties. Together, these results illustrate how the golden era of FRB observations enables a unified understanding of FRB populations, emission physics, and host-galaxy environments, and opens new paths toward their application in cosmology.
Bio: Shotaro Yamasaki is a NSTC visiting scholar at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Shotaro earned his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo in 2020, where he worked on Fast Radio Bursts and neutron star theories. He was previously at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Tokyo as a postdoc, where he worked on modeling Gamma-Ray Bursts, and Fast Radio Bursts.