Polarimetry and Photometry of Gamma-Ray Bursts Afterglows with RINGO3

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of optical afterglow polarimetry and photometry for gamma-ray bursts over seven years, revealing no clear correlation between polarization and other GRB properties, highlighting the need for larger samples.

Contribution

It provides a uniform re-analysis of RINGO3 GRB afterglow data, including polarization measurements and population-level insights using survival analysis.

Findings

Polarization detected in two GRBs.

No clear correlation between polarization and GRB properties.

Highlights need for larger early-time polarimetry samples.

Abstract

We present photometric and polarimetric measurements of gamma-ray burst (GRB) optical afterglows observed by the RINGO3 imaging polarimeter over its $\sim$7 year lifetime mounted on the Liverpool Telescope. During this time, RINGO3 responded to 67 GRB alerts. Of these, 28 had optical afterglows and a further ten were sufficiently bright for photometric and polarimetric analysis ($R\lessapprox{17}$). We present high quality multicolour light curves of ten sources: GRB 130606A, GRB 130610A, GRB 130612A, GRB 140430A, GRB 141220A, GRB 151215A, GRB 180325A, GRB 180618A, GRB 190114C, and GRB 191016A and polarimetry for seven of these (excluding GRB 130606A, GRB 130610A, and GRB 130612A, which were observed before the polarimetry mode was fully commissioned). Eight of these ten GRBs are classical long GRBs, one sits at the short-long duration interface with a $T_{90}$ $\sim$ 4 seconds and one is a classical short, hard burst with extended emission. We detect polarization for GRB 190114C and GRB 191016A. While detailed analyses of several of these GRBs have been published previously, here we present a uniform re-reduction and analysis of the whole sample and investigation of the population in a broad context relative to the current literature. We use survival analysis to fully include the polarization upper limits in the comparison with other GRB properties, such as temporal decay rate, isotropic energy and redshift. We find no clear correlation between polarization properties and wider sample properties and conclude that larger samples of early time polarimetry of GRB afterglows are required to fully understand GRB magnetic fields.