Meson Synchrotron Emission from Central Engines of Gamma-Ray Bursts with Strong Magnetic Fields

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are presumed to be powered by still unknown central engines for the timescales in the range $1ms\sim$ a few s. We propose that the GRB central engines would be a viable site for strong meson synchrotron emission if they were the compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars or rotating black holes with extremely strong magnetic fields $H\sim 10^{12}-10^{17}G$ and if protons or heavy nuclei were accelerated to ultra-relativistic energies of order $\sim 10^{12}-10^{22}eV$. We show that the charged scalar mesons like ${\pi }^{\pm }$ and heavy vector mesons like $\rho$, which have several decay modes onto ${\pi }^{\pm }$, could be emitted with high intensity a thousand times larger than photons through strong couplings to ultra-relativistic nucleons. These meson synchrotron emission processes eventually produce a burst of very high-energy cosmic neutrinos with $10^{12}eV\le E_{\nu }$. These neutrinos are to be detected during the early time duration of short GRBs.

12 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters

References in corpus (6)

• Gamma-Ray Bursts and the Fireball Model
• Are Gamma-Ray Bursts in Star Forming Regions?
• High Energy Neutrinos from Cosmological Gamma-Ray Burst Fireballs
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• High Energy Neutrinos and Photons from Curvature Pions in Magnetars
• Semiclassical theory of charged pion radiation by nucleons in a strong homogeneous magnetic field
• Collision of ultra-relativistic proton with strong magnetic field: production of ultra-high energy photons and neutrinos
• Searching for curvature pion radiation from protons in strongly magnetized pulsars