Related papers: Compton dragged gamma-ray bursts: the spectrum
We report on a study of the gamma-ray continuum emission from the Crab supernova nebula and on a search for nuclear de-excitation gamma-ray lines. Crab is the brightest continuum source in the 1-10 MeV gamma-ray sky, and its continuum…
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are expected to efficiently accelerate protons up to relativistic energies. High-energy photons can originate from decay of neutral pions produced by the interaction of these protons with the medium surrounding the…
Thermal photons from the photosphere may be the primary source of the observed prompt emission of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). In order to produce the observed non-thermal spectra, some kind of dissipation mechanism near the photosphere is…
Massive stars in binary systems have long been regarded as potential sources of high-energy gamma rays.The emission is principally thought to arise in the region where the stellar winds collide and accelerate relativistic particles which…
This paper introduces a kinetic code that simulates gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow emission from the external forward shock and presents examples of some of its applications. One interesting research topic discussed in the paper is the…
The origin of gamma-ray flares observed from blazars is one of the major mysteries in jet physics. We have attempted to address this problem following a novel spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting technique that explored the flaring…
The X-ray light curves of hundreds of bursts are now available, thanks to the X-ray Telescope on board the Swift satellite, on time scales from ~1 minute up to weeks and in some cases months from the burst explosion. These data allow us to…
We report a novel method for evaluating the energy spectrum of electrons emitting hard x-rays and gamma-rays in undulators and Compton sources. The method takes into account the quantum nature of recoils undergone by the electrons emitting…
In a recent paper we have calculated the power density spectrum of Gamma-Ray Bursts arising from multiple shocks in a relativistic wind. The wind optical thickness is one of the factors to which the power spectrum is most sensitive,…
We propose that repeated photoexcitation/ionization of high Z atoms of highly relativistic flows by star light in dense stellar regions followed by emission of decay/recombination photons, which are beamed and boosted to gamma ray energies…
We consider the radiative acceleration to relativistic bulk velocities of a cold, optically thin plasma which is exposed to an external source of gamma-rays. The flow is driven by radiative momentum input to the gas, the accelerating force…
If gamma ray bursts are highly collimated, the energy requirements of each event may be reduced by several (~ 4-6) orders of magnitude, and the event rate increased correspondingly. Extreme conditions in gamma ray bursters lead to highly…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays interacting with the radiation fields in the universe cause electromagnetic cascades resulting in a flux of extragalactic gamma rays, detectable to some 100 GeV. Recent precise measurements of the extragalactic…
Quasi-thermal Comptonization in internal shocks formed between relativistic shells can account for the high energy emission of gamma-ray bursts. This is in fact the dominant cooling mechanism if the typical energy of the emitting particles…
The radiation released at the transparency radius of an ultrarelativistic flow can account for the observed properties of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) provided that sufficient energy is dissipated in the sub-photospheric region. Here, I…
We consider all bursts with known redshift and $\nu F_\nu$ peak energy, $E^{obs}_{peak}$. For a good fraction of them an estimate of the jet opening angle is available from the achromatic break of their afterglow light curve. This allows…
Sources of high-energy photons have important applications in almost all areas of research. However, the photon flux and intensity of existing sources is strongly limited for photon energies above a few hundred keV. Here we show that a…
We investigate through dedicated numerical simulations the evolution of the soft X-ray absorption properties of a cloud surrounding a gamma-ray burst source. We show that the absorption properties of the material are strongly modified by…
We consider the resonant scattering of coherent electromagnetic waves by a Raman-like process in the gamma ray range off electrostatic modes in a quantum plasma using a collective Klein-Gordon-Maxwell model. The growth rates for the most…
The rapid time variability of gamma-ray bursts implies the sources are very compact, and the peak luminosities are so high that some matter must be ejected at ultra-relativistic speeds. The very large Lorentz factors of the bulk flow are…