Polarization of GRB Prompt Emission and its Application to POLAR's Data

Abstract

Synchrotron emission polarization is very sensitive to the magnetic field configuration. Recently, polarization of synchrotron emission with a mixed (SM) magnetic field in Gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow phase had been developed. Here, we apply these SM models to GRB prompt phase and compare their polarization properties with that of synchrotron emission in purely ordered (SO) magnetic field. We find that the polarization properties in a SM model are very similar to these in a corresponding SO model (e.g., synchrotron emission in a mixed magnetic field with an aligned ordered part (SMA) and synchrotron emission with a purely ordered aligned magnetic field (SOA)), only with a lower polarization degree (PD). We also discuss the statistical properties of the models. We find PDs of the simulated bursts are concentrated around $25\%$ for both SOA and synchrotron emission in a purely ordered toroidal magnetic field (SOT), while they can range from $0\%$ to $25\%$ for SMA and synchrotron emission in a mixed magnetic field with a toroidal ordered part (SMT), depending on ${\xi }_B$ value, i.e., the ratio of magnetic reduction of the ordered magnetic field over that of random magnetic field. From statistics, if PDs of majority GRBs are non-zero, then it favours SO and SM models. Further, if there are some bright GRBs with a prominently lower PDs than that of the majority GRBs, it favours SOT (SMT) models; if all the bright GRBs have comparable PDs with the majority ones, it favours SOA (SMA) models. Finally, we apply our results to POLAR's data and find that $\sim 10\%$ time-integrated PDs of the observed bursts favor SMA and SMT models, and ${\xi }_B$ parameter of these bursts is constrained to be around 1.135.

23 pages, 10 figures, accepted by RAA

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Polarization in early optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts driven by precessing jets
• Prospects for Time-Domain and Multi-Messenger Science with eXTP
• Design and preliminary performance study of the broad-band spectrometer detector for POLAR-2
• Investigating polarization signatures from GRB models