Average power density spectrum of Swift long gamma-ray bursts in the observer and in the source rest frames

TL;DR

This study analyzes the average power density spectra of 244 Swift long gamma-ray bursts, including 97 in the source rest frame, revealing a consistent power-law behavior without a clear break at 1 Hz and suggesting possible redshift evolution.

Contribution

First derivation of average PDS in the source rest frame for a large sample of Swift GRBs, comparing observer and source frames, and exploring energy dependence and redshift evolution.

Findings

Average PDS follows a power-law with index between 1.7 and 2.0.

No clear break at ~1 Hz in the PDS was observed.

Potential redshift evolution of the PDS slope was suggested.

Abstract

We calculate the average power density spectra (PDS) of 244 long gamma-ray bursts detected with the Swift Burst Alert Telescope in the 15-150 keV band from January 2005 to August 2011. For the first time we derived the average PDS in the source rest frame of 97 GRBs with known redshift. For 49 of them an average PDS was also obtained in a common source-frame energy band to account for the dependence of time profiles on energy. Previous results obtained on BATSE GRBs with unknown redshift showed that the average spectrum in the 25-2000 keV band could be modelled with a power-law with a 5/3 index over nearly two decades of frequency with a break at ~1 Hz. Depending on the normalisation and on the subset of GRBs considered, our results show analogous to steeper slopes (between 1.7 and 2.0) of the power-law. However, no clear evidence for the break at ~1 Hz was found, although the softer energy band of BAT compared with BATSE might account for that. We instead find a break at lower frequency corresponding to a typical source rest frame characteristic time of a few seconds. We furthermore find no significant differences between observer and source rest frames. Notably, no distinctive PDS features are found for GRBs with different intrinsic properties of the prompt emission either. Finally, the average PDS of GRBs at higher redshifts shows possibly shallower power-law indices than that of low-z GRBs. It is not clear whether this is due to an evolution with z of the average PDS.