baryonic content and geometry of the Universe.'
author:
- 'Vedantham H. K., Ravi V., Hallinan G.'
- 'Shannon R. M.'
bibliography:
- 'mombib.bib'
title: The Fluence and Distance Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts
---

Introduction
============

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, intense ($\sim 1$ Jy ms) radio bursts that have dispersion measures (DMs) well in excess of expected Milky Way contributions [@lorimer2007; @thornton2013; @ravi2015; @champ2015; @petroff2015; @spitler2014; @masui2015a; @keane2016]. Although the progenitors of FRBs and the associated emission mechanisms are interesting in their own right, the apparent extragalactic origin, if true, can be used to probe the intergalactic medium and the geometry of the Universe [@mcquinn2014; @masui2015b; @deng2014; @zheng2014; @kulkarni2014]. All reported bursts have been detected using single-dish telescopes that lack the angular resolution to obtain meaningful localizations, or even conclusively rule out a near-field or atmospheric origin. However (i) the strong adherence of FRBs to the dispersion and scattering laws expected from propagation through cold, turbulent plasma, and (ii) the measurement of Faraday rotation measure [@masui2015a] consistent with a magnetic field strength many orders of magnitude weaker than the terrestrial field, and (iii) detection of repeating bursts with a consistent sky poistion and dispersion measure [@spitler2016], all favor 