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The brightest gamma-ray burst, GRB 221009A, has spurred numerous theoretical investigations, with particular attention paid to the origins of ultrahigh-energy TeV photons during the prompt phase. However, analyzing the mechanism of radiation of photons in the ∼MeV range has been difficult because the high flux causes pileup and saturation effects in most GRB detectors. In this Letter, we present systematic modeling of the time-resolved spectra of the GRB using unsaturated data obtained from the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (precursor) and SATech-01/GECAM-C (main emission and flare). Our approach incorporates the synchrotron radiation model, which assumes an expanding emission region with relativistic speed and a global magnetic field that decays with radius, and successfully fits such a model to the observational data. Our results indicate that the spectra of the burst are fully in accordance with a synchrotron origin from relativistic electrons accelerated at a large emission radius. The lack of thermal emission in the prompt emission spectra supports a Poynting flux–dominated jet composition.

This work reports the electrochemical fabrication of Mg-Ca alloys by co-deposition of Mg and Ca ions in KCl-CaCl2-MgCl2 melts at 943 K on tungsten electrodes. Cyclic voltammetry indicated that co-reduction of Mg(II) and Ca(II) ions occurs at about -2.23 V in KCl-CaCl2 eutectic melts at 943 K. The diffusion coefficient of Mg(II) in KCl-CaCl2 eutectic melts was determined by chronopotentiometry with Sand's equation. Open-circuit chronopotentiometry was applied to evaluate the equilibrium potential of Mg(II)/Mg(0) system. Bulk products of Mg-Ca alloys were obtained by galvanastatic electrolysis at 6.00 A cm"2 on tungsten electrodes. The compositions of obtained Mg-Ca alloys were analyzed by inductive coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES). X-ray diffraction (XRD) indicates that Mg-Ca alloys mainly comprise a-Mg and Mg2Ca phases. The microstructure and micro-zone chemical analysis of Mg-Ca alloys were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perform a statistical analysis of the temporal and spectral properties of the latest Fermi gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to revisit the classification of GRBs. We find that the bimodalities of duration and the energy ratio (Epeak/Fluence) and the anti-correlation between spectral hardness (hardness ratio (HR), peak energy, and spectral index) and duration (T90) support the long/soft--short/hard classification scheme for Fermi GRBs. The HR--T90 anti-correlation strongly depends on the spectral shape of GRBs and energy bands, and the bursts with the curved spectra in the typical BATSE energy bands show a tighter anti-correlation than those with the power-law spectra in the typical BAT energy bands. This might explain why the HR--T90 correlation is not evident for those GRB samples detected by instruments like Swift with a narrower/softer energy bandpass. We also analyze the intrinsic energy correlation for the GRBs with measured redshifts and well-defined peak energies. The current sample suggests Ep,rest = 2455 x (Eiso/1052) 0.59 for short GRBs, significantly different from that for long GRBs. However, both the long and short GRBs comply with the same Ep,rest--Liso correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to understand the puzzle of classifying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), we perform a systematic study of Swift GRBs and investigate several short GRB issues. Though short GRBs have a short (≲2 s) prompt duration as monitored by the Burst Alert Telescope, the composite light curves including both the prompt and afterglow emission suggest that most of the short GRBs have a similar radiative feature to long GRBs. Furthermore, some well-studied short GRBs might also have an intrinsically long prompt duration, which renders them as a type of short GRB imposters. Genuine short GRBs detected by Swift might be rare, so determining the observed short GRBs is, not surprisingly, troublesome. In particular, the observational biases in the host identification and redshift measurement of GRBs should be taken with great caution. The redshift distribution, which has been found to be different for long and short GRBs, might have been strongly affected by the measurement methods. We find that the redshifts measured from the presumed host galaxies of long and short GRBs appear to have a similar distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We carry out a systematical study of the spectral lag properties of 50 single-pulsed gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor. By dividing the light curves into multiple consecutive energy channels, we provide a new measurement of the spectral lag that is independent of energy channel selections. We perform a detailed statistical study of our new measurements. We find two similar power-law energy dependencies of both the pulse arrival time and pulse width. Our new results on the power-law indices would favor the relativistic geometric effects for the origin of spectral lag. However, a complete theoretical framework that can fully account for the diverse energy dependencies of both arrival time and pulse width revealed in this work is still lacking. We also study the spectral evolution behaviors of the GRB pulses. We find that a GRB pulse with negligible spectral lag would usually have a shorter pulse duration and would appear to have a “hardness-intensity tracking” behavior, and a GRB pulse with a significant spectral lag would usually have a longer pulse duration and would appear to have a “hard-to-soft” behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violations of Lorentz invariance can lead to an energy-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which results in arrival-time differences of photons with different energies arising from a given transient source. In this work, direction-dependent dispersion constraints are obtained on nonbirefringent Lorentz-violating effects using the observed spectral lags of the gamma-ray burst GRB 160625B. This burst has unusually large high-energy photon statistics, so we can obtain constraints from the true spectral time lags of bunches of high-energy photons rather than from the rough time lag of a single highest-energy photon. Also, GRB 160625B is the only burst to date having a well-defined transition from positive lags to negative lags, providing a unique opportunity to distinguish Lorentz-violating effects from any source-intrinsic time lag in the emission of photons of different energy bands. Our results place comparatively robust two-sided constraints on a variety of isotropic and anisotropic coefficients for Lorentz violation, including the first bounds on Lorentz-violating effects from operators of mass dimension 10 in the photon sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong spectral softening has been revealed in the late X-ray afterglows of some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The scenario of X-ray scattering around the circumburst dusty medium has been supported by previous works due to its overall successful prediction of both the temporal and spectral evolution of some X-ray afterglows. To further investigate the observed feature of spectral softening we now systematically search the X-ray afterglows detected by the X-ray telescope aboard Swift and collect 12 GRBs with significant late-time spectral softening. We find that dust scattering could be the dominant radiative mechanism for these X-ray afterglows regarding their temporal and spectral features. For some well-observed bursts with high-quality data, the time-resolved spectra could be well-produced within the scattering scenario by taking into account the X-ray absorption from the circumburst medium. We also find that during spectral softening the power-law index in the high-energy end of the spectra does not vary much. The spectral softening is mainly manifested by the spectral peak energy continually moving to the soft end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]