Quantifying the memory and dynamical stability of magnetar bursts

TL;DR

This study analyzes magnetar burst time series to reveal long-term memory and weak chaos, suggesting potential links with fast radio bursts and providing new insights into their underlying dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the first quantification of memory in magnetar bursts and explores their dynamical stability, comparing them with fast radio bursts.

Findings

Existence of long-term memory in burst timing and energy.

Waiting times are not fully random, but energies are largely randomly organized.

Both waiting times and energies exhibit weak chaos.

Abstract

The time series of energy and waiting time of magnetar bursts carry important information about the source activity. In this paper, we investigate the memory and dynamical stability of magnetar bursts from four soft gamma repeater (SGR) sources: SGR 1806$-$20, SGR 1900+14, SGR J1935+2154 and SGR J1550$-$5418. Based on the rescaled range analysis, we quantify the memory in magnetar bursts for the first time and find that there exists long-term memory in the time series of both waiting time and energy. We investigate the dynamical stability in the context of randomness and chaos. For all the four SGR samples, we find that the waiting time is not completely random, but the energy of two SGRs is consistent with a total random organization. Furthermore, both waiting time and energy exhibits weak chaos. We also find no significant difference between SGRs and repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) in the randomness-chaos phase space. The statistical similarity between SGRs and repeating FRBs hints that there may be potential physical connection between these two phenomena.