Constraint on the Physical Origin of Gamma-Ray Burst Prompt Emission via Its Nondetected Diffuse Neutrino Emission

TL;DR

This study constrains the dominant physical models of gamma-ray burst prompt emission by analyzing the non-detection of diffuse neutrino flux, strongly favoring the ICMART model over others.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to estimate the contribution of different GRB models using neutrino non-detections, providing quantitative constraints on model fractions.

Findings

Most GRBs likely originate from the ICMART model.

Dissipative photosphere and internal shock models are constrained to very small fractions.

Model fractions depend on parameters like Lorentz factor and energy partition.

Abstract

The physical origin of prompt emission in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remains an open question since it has been studied more than half a century. Three alternative models (i.e. dissipative photosphere, internal shock, and Internal-Collision-induced MAgnetic Reconnection and Turbulence, ICMART) have been proposed to interpret the observations of GRB prompt emission, but none of them can fully interpret all of the observational data collected so far. The question is what is the fraction of these three theoretical models in the prompt emission of GRBs. In this paper, we propose to utilize an innovative method and constrain the fraction of GRB prompt emission models via its nondetected diffuse neutrinos. By adopting two methods (e.g., summing up the individual GRB contributions and assumed luminosity functions of GRB) to calculate diffuse neutrino flux of GRBs for given the benchmark parameters of $\Gamma=300$ and $\varepsilon_{p} \text{/} \varepsilon_{e}=10$, both approaches indicate that most GRBs should be originated from the ICMART model. Moreover, we find that the fractions of the dissipative photosphere model, the internal shock model, and the ICMART model are constrained to be [0, $0.5\%$], [0, $1.1\%$], and [$98.9\%$, 1], respectively, for the method of summing up the individual GRB contributions. For the method of luminosity functions, the fractions of above three models are constrained to be [0, $6.1\%$], [0, $8.2\%$], and [$91.8\%$, 1], respectively. However, such fractions of different models are also dependent on the parameters of $\Gamma$ and $\varepsilon_{p} \text{/} \varepsilon_{e}$.