Pre-burst neutrinos of gamma-ray bursters accompanied by high-energy photons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the possibility that high-energy neutrinos and photons are emitted before gamma-ray bursts, analyzing Fermi data and suggesting a pre-burst emission stage lasting several minutes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search for pre-burst high-energy photons associated with neutrino emissions, providing evidence for a long-duration pre-burst stage in GRBs.

Findings

14 high-energy photon events found before GRBs

Evidence supports a pre-burst emission stage of several minutes

Combined data with MAGIC photon suggests early neutrino-photon emission

Abstract

Previous researches on high-energy neutrino events from gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) suggest a neutrino speed variation $v(E)=c(1\pm E/E^{\nu}_{\mathrm{LV}})$ with ${E}^{\nu}_{\rm LV}=(6.4\pm 1.5)\times10^{17}~{ \rm GeV}$, together with an intrinsic time difference ${\Delta {t}_{\rm in}=(-2.8\pm 0.7)\times10^2~{\rm s}}$, which means that high-energy neutrinos come out about 300~s earlier than low-energy photons in the source reference system. Considering the possibility that pre-bursts of neutrinos may be accompanied by high-energy photons, in this work we search for high-energy photon events with earlier emission time from 100 to 1000~s before low-energy photons at source by analyzing Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) data. We perform the searching of photon events with energies larger than 100~MeV, and find 14 events from 48 GRBs with known redshifts. Combining these events with a $1.07~\rm{TeV}$ photon event observed by the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescopes (MAGIC), we suggest a pre-burst stage with a long duration period of several minutes of high energy neutrino emissions accompanied by high energy photons at the GRB source.