École Nationale Supérieure de
Techniques Avancées

Abstract

Since their discovery in 2007, fast radio bursts have attracted increasing attention from physicists. Radio telescopes have enabled a rapid increase in the number of observations of fast radio bursts, confirming that they are produced by sources beyond our galaxy. In the following work, we focus on a rare and as yet unobserved special case of repeated fast radio bursts, i.e. where the source produces several bursts, not necessarily at regular intervals, and which are strongly deflected by gravitational lenses. An extremely precise measurement of the arrival times of the bursts allows us to determine the time lag between the arrival of the different deflected fast radio bursts. We show how this precision allows the search for long-wave gravitational waves, in particular those originating from supermassive binary black holes. The timing of the arrival of bursts for strongly deflected repetitive radio bursts is sensitive to gravitational wave sources, which may be at cosmological distances and would therefore be extremely difficult to detect by other means.