Detecting Dark Matter Substructures on Small Scales with Fast Radio Bursts

We propose measuring the arrival time difference of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) along two adjacent sightlines as a new probe to dark matter substructures on scales down to ∼ 1AU. We discuss two observational scenarios in which it may be possible to place interesting constraints on such models through monitoring repeating FRB sources: 1) By sending radio receivers to space to form a baseline of tens of AU or more and measuring the temporal variation of the arrival time difference between receivers. 2) By measuring the temporal variation of the arrival time difference between two lensed images of one strongly lensed repeater. In both scenarios, obtaining interesting constraints requires correlating the voltage time series to measure the radio-signal arrival time to sub-nanosecond precision. We find that two radio dishes separated by 20AU may be sensitive to the enhancement of small-scale structures at ∼ 10^-8M_⊙ masses in the QCD axion dark matter scenario or from an early epoch of matter-domination with a reheating temperature up to 60 MeV. Other dark matter models such as those composed of ∼ 10^-13M_⊙ primordial black holes produced during inflation would also be probed by this method. We further show that a strong lensing situation of multiple images provides an equivalent ∼ 2000AU baseline, which can be much more sensitive but with the uncertainty that intervening ISM decoherence may degrade the timing precision and that spatial variation in the FRB emission spot may result in confounding signals. We show that the lensing magnifications of Type Ia supernovea constrain a similar quantity to such FRB timing, with present limits being equivalent to ruling out the same parameter space that would be probed by a 0.14AU baseline.