Detection of afterglow emission up to 100 GeV through a stacking analysis of gamma-ray bursts

TL;DR

This study reports a significant detection of gamma-ray emission up to 100 GeV from a large sample of GRBs using stacking analysis, revealing insights into afterglow mechanisms and potential energy injection effects.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of high-energy gamma-ray emission up to 100 GeV through stacking analysis of 330 GRBs, advancing understanding of GRB afterglow physics.

Findings

Detection of gamma-ray emission up to 100 GeV with high significance.

Standard afterglow models explain bright GRBs but not weaker ones.

Possible energy injection effects in weak GRBs are suggested.

Abstract

High-energy gamma-ray (>GeV) emission of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is very important in probing the jet evolution and particle acceleration of GRBs. The observations of high-energy photons are limited except for a few very bright GRBs, hindering precise measurements of the spectral and temporal evolutions of GRBs. Here we report the detection of high-energy gamma-ray emission up to 100 GeV with Fermi-LAT using a stacking analysis of a collection of 330 GRBs. High significance detection of the emission has been found, and the precise light curves and energy spectra can be measured. The light curves and time-resolved spectra of the sub-sample of 220 LAT individually detected GRBs can be well explained by the standard afterglow emission from a population of GRBs with both synchrotron and synchrotron self-Compton mechanisms, assuming a distribution of initial Lorentz factors. However, the emission of the relatively weak sample of the 110 LAT individually undetected GRBs cannot be well reproduced in the same framework, indicating the existence of possible energy injection effect in the GeV band for the first time. The observations hence provide new insights in understanding the high-energy emission of GRBs.