Numerical simulation of photospheric emission in long gamma-ray bursts: prompt correlations, spectral shapes, and polarizations

TL;DR

This study uses 3D simulations to analyze photospheric emission in long gamma-ray bursts, confirming spectral correlations, exploring polarization features, and highlighting the need for non-thermal processes to match observed spectra.

Contribution

It introduces detailed 3D numerical models combining hydrodynamics and radiation transfer to study spectral and polarization properties of GRB photospheric emission, revealing new insights.

Findings

Photospheric emission reproduces observed spectral correlations.

Spectral shapes are narrower than observed, indicating missing non-thermal broadening.

Polarization varies with viewing angle and energy, with potential large temporal and energy-dependent swings.

Abstract

We explore the properties of photospheric emission in the context of long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) using three numerical models that combine relativistic hydrodynamical simulations and Monte Carlo radiation transfer calculations in three dimensions. Our simulations confirm that the photospheric emission gives rise to correlations between the spectral peak energy and luminosity that agree with the observed Yonetoku, Amati, and Golenetskii correlations. It is also shown that the spectral peak energy and luminosity correlate with the bulk Lorentz factor, as indicated in the literature. On the other hand, synthetic spectral shapes tend to be narrower than those of the observations. The result indicates that an additional physical process that can provide non-thermal broadening is needed to reproduce the spectral features. Furthermore, the polarization analysis finds that, while the degree of polarization is low for the emission from the jet core ($\Pi < 4~\%$), it tends to increase with the viewing angle outside the core and can be as high as $\Pi \sim 20-40~\%$ in an extreme case. This suggests that the typical GRBs show systematically low polarization compared to softer, dimmer counterparts (X-ray-rich GRBs and X-ray flashes). Interestingly, our simulations indicate that photospheric emission exhibits large temporal variation in the polarization position angle ($\Delta \psi \sim 90^{\circ}$), which may be compatible with those inferred in observations. A notable energy dependence of the polarization property is another characteristic feature found in the current study. Particularly, the difference in the position angle among different energy bands can be as large as $\sim 90^{\circ}$.