Signatures of the Self-organized Criticality Phenomenon in Precursors of Gamma-ray bursts

TL;DR

This study analyzes gamma-ray burst precursors and main bursts, revealing they exhibit power-law distributions and scale-invariance consistent with self-organized criticality, suggesting a common magnetically driven physical process.

Contribution

It demonstrates that both precursors and main bursts follow power-law distributions and exhibit scale-invariance, supporting a unified self-organized criticality framework for GRB phenomena.

Findings

Distributions fit power-law models

Scale-invariance structures confirmed

Both precursors and main bursts share similar physical processes

Abstract

Precursors provide important clues to the nature of gamma-ray burst (GRB) central engines and can be used to contain GRB physical processes. In this letter, we study the self-organized criticality in precursors of long GRBs in the third Swift/BAT Catalog. We investigate the differential and cumulative size distributions of 100 precursors, including peak flux, duration, rise time, decay time, and quiescent time with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique. It is found that all of the distributions can be well described by power-law models and understood within the physical framework of a self-organized criticality system. In addition, we inspect the cumulative distribution functions of the size differences with a q-Gaussian function. The scale-invariance structures of precursors further strengthen our findings. Particularly, similar analyses are made in 127 main bursts. The results show that both precursors and main bursts can be attributed to an self-organized criticality system with the spatial dimension S = 3 and driven by the similar magnetically dominated process.