Numerical study of synchrotron and inverse-Compton radiation from gamma-ray burst afterglows with decaying microturbulence

TL;DR

This study develops a numerical model to analyze how decaying microturbulence behind shock fronts affects synchrotron and inverse-Compton emissions in gamma-ray burst afterglows, revealing key spectral and light curve differences from homogeneous turbulence models.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel numerical code to simulate electron evolution and radiation in decaying microturbulence, providing new insights into GRB afterglow emissions and their dependence on magnetic field decay.

Findings

Synchrotron spectra are similar in DM and HT models at low magnetic fields.

Inverse-Compton spectra show more significant differences between models.

Faster magnetic field decay results in weaker IC components and steeper light curves.

Abstract

The multiwavelength observations of GRB afterglows, together with some high-performance particle-in-cell simulations, hint that the magnetic field may decay behind the shock front. In this work, we develop a numerical code to calculate the evolution of the accelerated electron distribution, their synchrotron and inverse-Compton (IC) spectra and accordingly the light curves (LCs) under the assumption of decaying microturbulence (DM) downstream of the shock, $\epsilon_B(t_p')\propto t_p'^{\alpha_t}$ with $t_p'$ the fluid proper time since injection. We find: (1) The synchrotron spectrum in the DM model is similar to that in the homogeneous turbulence (HT) model with very low magnetic field strength. However, the difference in the IC spectral component is relatively more obvious between them, due to the significant change of the postshock electron energy distribution with DM. (2) If the magnetic field decay faster, there are less electrons cool fast, and the IC spectral component becomes weaker. (3) The LCs in the DM model decay steeper than in the HT model, and the spectral evolution and the LCs in the DM model is similar to the HT model where the magnetic field energy fraction decreases with observer time, $\epsilon_B(t) \propto t^{5\alpha_t /8}$. (4) The DM model can naturally produce a significant IC spectral component in TeV energy range, but due to the Klein-Nishina suppression the IC power cannot be far larger than the synchrotron power. We apply the DM model to describe the afterglow data of GRB 190114C and find the magnetic field decay exponent $\alpha_t\sim -0.4$ and the electron spectral index $p\sim2.4$. Future TeV observations of the IC emission from GRB afterglows will further help to probe the poorly known microphysics of relativistic shocks.