Extragalactic dispersion measures of fast radio bursts

Fast radio bursts show large dispersion measures, much larger than the Galactic dispersion measure foreground. Therefore,they evidently have an extragalactic origin. We investigate possible contributions to the dispersion measure from host galaxies. We simulate the spatial distribution of fast radio bursts and calculate the dispersion measures along the sightlines from fast radio bursts to the edge of host galaxies by using the scaled NE2001 model for thermal electron density distributions. We find that contributions to the dispersion measure of fast radio bursts from the host galaxy follow a skew Gaussian distribution. The peak and the width at half maximum of the dispersion measure distribution increase with the inclination angle of a spiral galaxy, to large values when the inclination angle is over 70\degr. The largest dispersion measure produced by an edge-on spiral galaxy can reach a few thousand pc~cm$^{-3}$, while the dispersion measures from dwarf galaxies and elliptical galaxies have a maximum of only a few tens of pc~cm$^{-3}$. Notice, however, that additional dispersion measures of tens to hundreds of pc~cm$^{-3}$ can be produced by high density clumps in host galaxies. Simulations that include dispersion measure contributions from the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda Galaxy are shown as examples to demonstrate how to extract the dispersion measure from the intergalactic medium.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Multiple Staggered Mesh Ewald: Boosting the Accuracy of the Smooth Particle Mesh Ewald Method

The smooth particle mesh Ewald (SPME) method is the standard method for computing the electrostatic interactions in the molecular simulations. In this work, the multiple staggered mesh Ewald (MSME) method is proposed to boost the accuracy of the SPME method. Unlike the SPME that achieves higher accuracy by refining the mesh, the MSME improves the accuracy by averaging the standard SPME forces computed on, e.g. $M$, staggered meshes. We prove, from theoretical perspective, that the MSME is as accurate as the SPME, but uses $M^2$ times less mesh points in a certain parameter range. In the complementary parameter range, the MSME is as accurate as the SPME with twice of the interpolation order. The theoretical conclusions are numerically validated both by a uniform and uncorrelated charge system, and by a three-point-charge water system that is widely used as solvent for the bio-macromolecules