Spectral hardness evolution characteristics of tracking Gamma-ray Burst pulses

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spectral hardness evolution of tracking gamma-ray burst pulses, revealing consistent patterns of high initial $E_{peak}$ that decrease over time, supporting existing GRB models and suggesting a link to kinematic and dynamic processes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of $E_{peak}$ evolution in tracking GRB pulses, confirming predicted patterns and offering constraints for GRB theoretical models.

Findings

$E_{peak}$ in rise phase starts high (median ~300 keV)

Decay phase ends at lower $E_{peak}$ (median ~200 keV)

Rise phase is shorter and spectrally harder than decay phase

Abstract

Employing a sample presented by Kaneko et al. (2006) and Kocevski et al. (2003), we select 42 individual tracking pulses (here we defined tracking as the cases in which the hardness follows the same pattern as the flux or count rate time profile) within 36 Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs) containing 527 time-resolved spectra and investigate the spectral hardness, $E_{peak}$ (where $E_{peak}$ is the maximum of the $\nu F_{\nu}$ spectrum), evolutionary characteristics. The evolution of these pulses follow soft-to-hard-to-soft (the phase of soft-to-hard and hard-to-soft are denoted by rise phase and decay phase, respectively) with time. It is found that the overall characteristics of $E_{peak}$ of our selected sample are: 1) the $E_{peak}$ evolution in the rise phase always start on the high state (the values of $E_{peak}$ are always higher than 50 keV); 2) the spectra of rise phase clearly start at higher energy (the median of $E_{peak}$ are about 300 keV), whereas the spectra of decay phase end at much lower energy (the median of $E_{peak}$ are about 200 keV); 3) the spectra of rise phase are harder than that of the decay phase and the duration of rise phase are much shorter than that of decay phase as well. In other words, for a complete pulse the initial $E_{peak}$ is higher than the final $E_{peak}$ and the duration of initial phase (rise phase) are much shorter than the final phase (decay phase). This results are in good agreement with the predictions of Lu et al. (2007) and current popular view on the production of GRBs. We argue that the spectral evolution of tracking pulses may be relate to both of kinematic and dynamic process even if we currently can not provide further evidences to distinguish which one is dominant. Moreover, our statistical results give some witnesses to constrain the current GRB model.