Large-scale Magnetic Field Model of GRB Afterglow Polarization: Effects of Field Anisotropy, Off-axis Viewing Angle, and Ordered Field

TL;DR

This study develops a large-scale magnetic field model for GRB afterglow polarization, exploring effects of anisotropy, viewing angle, and ordered fields, and compares it with observations to understand magnetic field origins.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytic large-scale turbulence model for GRB afterglow polarization, contrasting it with microscopic models and analyzing the impact of ordered magnetic fields.

Findings

Large-scale turbulence can reproduce observed polarization behaviors.

Polarization degree and angle are constant only when ordered-to-fluctuated field energy ratio exceeds 50%.

Predicted polarization degrees are higher than observed when ordered fields dominate.

Abstract

The afterglows of gamma-ray bursts are non-thermal electron synchrotron emissions from relativistic shocks. The origin of strong magnetic field in the emission region remains elusive, and two field amplification mechanisms via the plasma kinetic and magnetohydrodynamic instabilities have been discussed. The polarimetric observations are a powerful probe to distinguish these two mechanisms. So far, most theoretical works have focused on the former mechanism and constructed afterglow polarization models with microscopic-scale turbulence whose coherence length is much smaller than the thickness of the blast wave. In this work, focusing on the latter mechanism, we utilize our semi-analytic model of the synchrotron polarization with large-scale turbulence whose coherence length is comparable to the thickness of the blast wave to investigate the effect of magnetic field anisotropy and the observer viewing angle. We find that the polarization in our large-scale turbulence model can exhibit both behaviors characteristic of the microscopic-scale turbulence model and those not seen in the microscopic-scale model. Then we find that the large-scale model could explain all the polarimetric observational data to date that seem to be forward shock emission. We also examine the effect of ordered-field component, and find that polarization degree and polarization angle constant in time are realized only when the energy density ratio of the ordered and fluctuated components is $\gtrsim 50$. In this case, however, the polarization degree is much higher than the observed values.