Identifying the poynting-flux-dominated outflow of Fermi GRBs with non-thermal spectrum and its energy-resolved light curve fitting

TL;DR

This study analyzes Fermi GRB data to identify Poynting-flux-dominated outflows through spectral and light curve analysis, revealing high magnetization in many jets and a correlation between pulse width and energy.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic spectral and light curve fitting approach to determine jet composition and magnetization in GRBs, providing new evidence for Poynting-flux dominance.

Findings

30 pulses in 21 GRBs have lower limit of magnetization factor > 5

High $\sigma$ GRBs show a pulse width-energy correlation

Evidence supports Poynting-flux dominated outflows in bright GRBs

Abstract

The jet compositions of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are very important to understand the energy dissipation and radiation mechanisms, but it remains an open question in GRB physics. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis to search for 88 bright GRBs that include a total of 129 pulses observed by Fermi/GBM with redshift measured, and extract the spectra of each pulse with Band function (Band), cutoff power-law (CPL), blackbody (BB), non-dissipative photospheric (NDP), Band+BB, as well as CPL+BB. We find that 80 pulses, 35 pulses, and 14 pulses present purely non-thermal, hybrid, and thermal spectra, respectively. By focusing on those 80 pulses with purely non-thermal spectra, one can estimate the lower limits of magnetization factor ($\sigma$) via suppressing the pseudo-thermal component. It is found that 30 pulses in 21 GRBs are the lower limit of $\sigma>5$ at the photosphere by adopting $R_{0}=10^{10}$ cm. It suggests that at least the outflow of those GRB jets with high $\sigma$ is dominated by Poynting-flux. On the other hand, we also perform the light curve fitting with a fast-rise-exponential-decay (FRED) model for 15 bright GRBs with a high magnetization factor in our sample, and find that a correlation between pulse width ($w$) and energy of 13 GRBs really exists in their energy-resolved light curves. It is also a piece of independent evidence for those GRBs with a high value $\sigma$ to support the origin of the Poynting flux outflow.