A neural network model for the cosmic dispersion measure in the CAMELS simulations

ABSTRACT The probability distribution, $p(\mathrm{DM})$ of cosmic dispersion measures (DM) measured in fast radio bursts (FRBs) encodes information about both cosmology and galaxy feedback. In this work, we study the effect of feedback parameters in the $p(\mathrm{DM})$ calculated from the full Latin Hypercube of parameters sampled by the CAMELS hydrodynamical simulation suite, building a neural network (NN) model that performs well in emulating the effect of feedback on $p(\mathrm{DM})$ at arbitrary redshifts at $z\le 1$. Using this NN model, we further study the parameter $F\equiv \sigma _{\rm DM} \, z^{1/2}$, which is commonly used to summarize the scatter on $p(\mathrm{DM})$. We find that F does not depend monotonically on every feedback parameter; instead each feedback mechanism jointly influences the final feedback strength in non-trivial ways. Even the largest values of F that we find in our entire parameter space are small compared to the current constraints from observed FRB DMs by Baptista et al., pointing at the limitations of the CAMELS suite due to the small simulation box sizes. In the future, with larger box-sizes from CAMELS-like suites, similar models can be used to constrain the parameters governing galaxy feedback in the increasing observational samples of FRBs.