Searching for gravitationally lensed gamma-ray bursts with their afterglows

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect gravitationally lensed gamma-ray bursts by analyzing their multi-band afterglow lightcurves, focusing on characteristic signatures like rebrightening and superimposed flares, to identify lensing effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using afterglow lightcurve analysis under standard lens models to search for lensed GRBs, enhancing detection prospects.

Findings

Identified a potential lensed GRB candidate with a 500s time delay.

Analyzed archival data to test the method, finding limited evidence for lensing.

Proposed future observational strategies for improved detection.

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) at high redshifts are expected to be gravitationally lensed by objects of different mass scales. Besides a single recent claim, no lensed GRB has been detected so far by using the gamma-ray data only. In this paper, we suggest that the multi-band afterglow data might be an efficient way to search for lensed GRB events. Using the standard afterglow model we calculate the characteristics of the lensed afterglow lightcurves under the assumption of two popular analytic lens models: point mass and Singular Isothermal Sphere (SIS) model. In particular, when different lensed images cannot be resolved, their signals would be superimposed together with a given time delay. In this case, the X-ray afterglows are likely to contain several X-ray flares of similar width in linear scale and similar spectrum, and the optical afterglow lightcurve will show rebrightening signatures. Since the lightcurves from the image arriving later would be compressed and deformed in the logarithmic time scale, the larger time delay (i.e. the larger mass of the lens), the easier is to identify the lensing effect. We analyzed the archival data of optical afterglows and found one potential candidate of the lensed GRB (130831A) with time delay $\sim$500 s, however, observations of this event in gamma-ray and X-ray band seem not to support the lensing hypothesis. In the future, with the cooperation of the all-sky monitoring gamma-ray detectors and multi-band sky survey projects, our method proposed in this paper would be more efficient in searching for strongly lensed GRBs.