Inferring redshift and energy distributions of fast radio bursts from the first CHIME/FRB catalog

We reconstruct the extragalactic dispersion measure \ -- redshift relation (${\rm DM_E}-z$ relation) from well-localized fast radio bursts (FRBs) using Bayesian inference method. Then the ${\rm DM_E}-z$ relation is used to infer the redshift and energy of the first CHIME/FRB catalog. We find that the distributions of extragalactic dispersion measure and inferred redshift of the non-repeating CHIME/FRBs follow cut-off power law, but with a significant excess at the low-redshift range. We apply a set of criteria to exclude events which are susceptible to selection effect, but find that the excess at low redshift still exists in the remaining FRBs (which we call Gold sample). The cumulative distributions of fluence and energy for both the full sample and the Gold sample do not follow the simple power law, but they can be well fitted by the bent power law. The underlying physical implications remain to be further investigated.
Comment: 13 pages plus one long table, accepted by Chinese Physics C