TeV afterglow emission from a structured GRB jet using the kinetic approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates how structured gamma-ray burst jets influence TeV afterglow emission using a kinetic approach, revealing the impact of jet structure on inverse Compton flux and electron cooling processes.

Contribution

It introduces a modified kinetic model incorporating adiabatic expansion and self-consistent IC cooling, comparing results with semi-analytical models and applying to GRB 170817A.

Findings

Jet structure affects TeV emission and IC peak flux.

Spectral differences depend on Klein-Nishina effects.

GRB 170817A would not be detectable in TeV if viewed on-axis.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing sample of TeV emission detections in gamma-ray burst afterglows, as well as an increasing role for structured jets in afterglow modelling. Using a kinetic approach, we show that the structure of an afterglow jet impacts its TeV emission, with jets where the energy falls off more sharply with angle showing a decrease in Inverse Compton (IC) peak flux relative to synchrotron peak flux. We use a modified version of the code katu, to which we have added adiabatic expansion and a fully self-consistent treatment of IC cooling both for the electron and photon populations. We compare our results to the semi-analytical code afterglowpy, finding a good agreement with our model except at early times off axis where the effects of baryon loading are important. We compare electron cooling in the cases where there is no IC cooling, Thomson cooling and an inclusion of Klein-Nishina effects, finding that the spectra can only be distinguished if the Compton potential is significantly increased. We obtain a similar cooling rate compared to semi-analytical solutions, with some small difference at the transition from IC to synchrotron dominated cooling. Finally, we use best-fit parameters determined by afterglowpy and re-scaled for our model to reproduce the light curves of GRB 170817A. For our choice of parameters, we find that GRB 170817 would not have been detected in the TeV domain if seen on-axis, even by the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory.