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Do fast radio bursts come from earthquakes or magnetar flares?

Si-Lu Xu, Yong-Kun Zhang, Pei Wang, Di Li, Jun-Shuo Zhang, Tian-Cheng Lv, Yong-Feng Huang, Tian-Cong Wang, Long-Xuan Zhang, Pei-Xin Zhu, Jin-Huang Cao, Yi Feng, He Gao, Jian Li, Wan-Jin Lu, Chen-Chen Miao, Chen-Hui Niu, Qing-Yue Qu, Chao-Wei Tsai, Yi-Dan Wang, Wen-Ting Wang, Su-Ming Weng, Jia-Fu Wu, Ru-Shuang Zhao, Yuan-Chuan Zou, Yu-Hao Zhu, Ya-Biao Wang

June 1, 2026

Astronomers developed a diagnostic tool—the Pincus-Lyapunov diagram—that plots transient events in a chaos-versus-randomness space. When they mapped burst sequences from five repeating FRBs, five magnetars, solar flares, and earthquakes onto this diagram, repeating FRBs occupied a distinct region, statistically separate from magnetars and pulsar glitches. This suggests FRB mechanisms are fundamentally different from competing models.
Published as Fast radio bursts, magnetars and earthquakes: their "family feud"? arXiv:2606.01855
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