Energy-dependent polarization of Gamma-Ray Bursts' prompt emission with the POLAR and POLAR-2 instruments

TL;DR

This paper presents the first energy-resolved polarization measurements of Gamma-Ray Bursts using POLAR data, offering new insights into their emission mechanisms and informing future observations with POLAR-2.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy-resolved polarization analysis of GRBs, enhancing understanding of polarization evolution and preparing for improved measurements with POLAR-2.

Findings

Energy-dependent polarization hints within GRB pulses

Time-resolved polarization analysis reveals evolving angles

Preliminary results inform theoretical models

Abstract

Gamma-Ray Bursts are among the most powerful events in the Universe. Despite half a century of observations of these transient sources, many open questions remain about their nature. Polarization measurements of the GRB prompt emission have long been theorized to be able to answer most of these questions. With the aim of characterizing the polarization of these prompt emissions, a compact Compton polarimeter, called POLAR, has been launched to space in September 2016. Time integrated polarization analysis of the POLAR GRB catalog have shown that the prompt emission is lowly polarized or fully unpolarized. However, time resolved analysis depicted strong hints of an evolving polarization angle within single pulses, washing out the polarization degree in time integrated analyses. Here we will for the first time present energy resolved polarization measurements with the POLAR data. The novel analysis, performed on several GRBs, will provide new insights and alter our understanding of GRB polarization. The analysis was performed using the 3ML framework to fit polarization parameters versus energy in parallel to the spectral parameters. Although limited by statistics, the results could provide a very relevant input to disentangle between existing theoretical models. In order to gather more statistics per GRB and perform joint time and energy resolved analysis, a successor instrument, called POLAR-2, is under development with a launch window early 2025 to the CSS. After presenting the first energy resolved polarization results of the POLAR mission, we will present the prospects for such measurements with the upcoming POLAR-2 mission.