On the Broadening of the Pulse Width of FRB 20121102A due to Propagation and Instrumental Effects

The pulse widths of fast radio bursts are always broadened due to the scattering of the plasma medium through which the electromagnetic wave passes. The recorded pulse width will be further affected by the radio telescopes since the sampling time and the bandwidth cannot be infinitely small. In this study, we focus on the pulse widths of the 3287 bursts detected from FRB 20121102A as of October 2023. Various effects such as the scattering broadening, the redshift broadening and the instrumental broadening are examined. It is found that the instrumental broadening only contributes a fraction of 10^-3–10^-1 to the observed pulse width. The scattering broadening is even smaller, which constitutes a tiny fraction of 10^-5–10^-2 in the observed pulse width. After correcting for these broadenings, the intrinsic pulse width is derived for each burst. The maximum and minimum pulse widths at different frequencies are highlighted. Interestingly, both the mean value and the dispersion range of intrinsic pulse width are found to be inversely proportional to the square of the central frequency. The intrinsic widths of most bursts are in a narrow range of 1–10 ms, which leads to a quasi-linear correlation between the fluence and the peak flux.