English

On the synchrotron spectrum of GRB prompt emission

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-02-07 v2

Abstract

The prompt emission spectrum of Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) is characterized by a smoothly joint broken power-law spectrum known as the Band function. The typical low-energy photon index is 1\sim -1, which poses challenge to the standard synchrotron radiation models. We investigate the electron energy spectrum as a result of the interplay among adiabatic stochastic acceleration (ASA), particle injection, and synchrotron cooling. In the ASA-dominated low-energy range, ASA enables an efficient hardening of the injected energy spectrum to approach a spectral index 1-1. In the synchrotron cooling-dominated high-energy range, the injected high-energy electrons undergo fast synchrotron cooling and have a softer photon spectrum. With the energy range of the injected electrons broadly covering both the ASA- and synchrotron cooling-dominated ranges, the resulting photon number spectrum has the low- and high-energy indices as αs1\alpha_s \sim -1 and βsp/21\beta_s \sim -p/2-1, respectively. The break energy is of the order of 100\sim 100 keV, depending on the turbulence properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.03943,
  title  = {On the synchrotron spectrum of GRB prompt emission},
  author = {Siyao Xu and Yuan-Pei Yang and Bing Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.03943},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ