Pair Attenuation Signatures in Gamma-Ray Bursts with High-Energy Spectral Components

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

Relativistic bulk motions have been invoked for a handful of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to explain the absence of internal pair creation attenuation of their spectra above 100 MeV, using data acquired by the EGRET experiment aboard the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. The anticipated launch in 2008 of the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), with dramatically improved sensitivities in the 30 MeV-300 GeV energy band, will usher in an era of more stringent diagnostics on such bulk motions. Recent work (Baring, 2006) exploring time-dependent expectations for burst spectral properties in the EGRET/GLAST band has identified distinctive evolutionary trends for internal pair creation turnovers. This has focused on single-component sources with prompt emission peaking only in the MeV. In this paper, we build upon this work by delving into the interesting case of GRB 941017. This EGRET-TASC burst has exhibited strong evidence of a second gamma-ray component that peaks above 100 MeV, which becomes more pronounced as the burst evolves. We model potential turnovers in this source to define how such evolution might provide useful emission region diagnostics, for example on whether the GRB outflow coasts at constant speed, or if the bulk Lorentz factor declines with time. This investigation serves as a template for multi-component, bright bursts that might be more amenable to subtle source diagnostics using GLAST, given that they may possess unusually high fluxes in the super-GeV band.

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