Standardizing the GRBs with the Amati Ep,i - Eiso relation: the updated Hubble diagram and implications for cosmography

TL;DR

This paper updates the use of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) with the Amati relation to extend the Hubble diagram up to redshift ~8, testing dark energy models and addressing calibration biases with new data and methods.

Contribution

It introduces an updated calibration of the Amati relation using a large GRB dataset and compares different calibration methods to improve high-redshift cosmography.

Findings

GRBs can be calibrated independently of cosmological models.

The fiducial and calibrated GRB Hubble diagrams are statistically consistent.

No significant evolutionary effects are detected in current GRB datasets.

Abstract

The correlation between the peak photon energy of the internal spectrum Ep,i and isotropic equivalent radiated energy Eiso (the Amati relation) is explored in a scalar field model of dark energy. Using an updated data set of 109 high redshift GRBs, we show that the correlation parameters only weakly depend on the cosmological model. Once the parameters of Amati relation have been determined we use this relation to construct a fiducial GRBs Hubble diagram that extends up to redshifts ~ 8. Moreover we apply a local regression technique to estimate, in a model independent way, the distance modulus from the recently updated Union SNIa sample, containing 557 SNIa spanning the redshift range of 0.015 < z <1.55. The derived calibration parameters are used to construct an updated GRBs Hubble diagram, which we call the calibrated GRBs HD. We also compare the fiducial and calibrated GRBs HDs, which turned out to be fully statistically consistent, thus indicating that they are not affected by any systematic bias induced by the different calibration procedures. This means that the high redshift GRBs can be used to test different models of dark energy settling the circularity problem. Furthermore, we investigate possible evolutionary effects that might have important influence on our results. Our analysis indicates that the presently available GRBs datasets do not show statistically unambiguous evolutionary effect with the cosmological redshift. Finally we propose another approach to calibrate the GRB relations, by using an approximate luminosity distance relation, which holds in any cosmological model. We use this calibration of the Amati relation to construct an empirical approximate HD, which we compare with the calibrated GRBs HD. We finally investigate the implications of this approach for the high redshift cosmography.