# Spectral Lags of Gamma-Ray Bursts From Ginga and BATSE

## 1 INTRODUCTION

More than 26 years have passed since gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) were discovered (Klebesadel, Strong & Olson (1973)). The Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) found that GRBs appear to be isotropic on the sky, yet there is a dearth of faint events compared to the brightest events, implying that the bursts are at cosmological distances (Meegan et al. (1992)). The cosmological origin of many GRBs was firmly established as a result of follow-up observations of fading X-ray counterparts to GRB sources discovered with the Beppo-SAX mission (e.g., Costa et al. (1997)). However, the radiation mechanism of GRBs is still unclear. This situation is partly due to the absence of any significant correlations between the GRB spectral and temporal properties.

Recently, several research groups have investigated the correlation between GRB spectral and temporal properties. By using the average autocorrelation function and the average pulse width, Fenimore et al. (1995) presented a very well defined relationship: the average pulse width of many bursts, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$, is well fitted by a power law of the energy $`E`$ at which the observation is made: $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau 18.1E^{0.45\pm 0.05}`$. Norris et al. (1996) proposed a “pulse paradigm” and also found that the average pulse shape dependence on energy is approximately a power law, with an index of $`0.40`$, consistent with the analysis of Fenimore et al. (1995). Kazanas, Titarchuk & Hua (1998) proposed that synchrotron cooling could account for the power law relationship between $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$ and $`E`$.

The general observed trend in spectral evolution is hard to soft (Norris et al. (1986), Norris et al. (1996), Band (1997)). The hard-to-soft spectral evolution can lead to a distinct, observed effects: pulse peaks migrate to later times and become wider at lower energies (Norris et al. (1996), Norris et al. (1999)). Cheng et al. (1995) claimed that about 24% of bursts in their sample of BATSE bursts have detectable time delay between BATSE channel 1 (25-57 keV) and channel 3 (115-320 keV). In this paper, we analyzed the cross-correlation average lags between different set of energy bands for two GRB samples: 19 events detected by Ginga, and 109 events detected by BATSE. We discussed our results and its implication for GRB models.

## 2 METHODOLOGY

The cross-correlation function (CCF) has been widely used to measure the temporal correlation of two GRB energy bands $`c_{1i}`$ and $`c_{2i}`$ (Link et al. (1993), Cheng et al. (1995), Norris et al. (1999)). Here $`c_i=m_ib_i`$ is the net counts from GRB time profiles, where the background contribution, $`b_i`$, has been subtracted from raw counts $`m_i`$. A time interval of T is selected around the largest peak consisting of $`N`$ time bins each of duration $`\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ s, indexed between $`N/2`$ and $`+N/2`$. The CCF as a function of time lag, $`j\mathrm{\Delta }T`$, is

$`CCF_j`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{i=N/2}{\overset{N/2}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{c_{1i+j}c_{2i}}{S}}\mathrm{for}j0`$   
$`=`$ $`1\mathrm{for}j=0`$   
where the normalization factor $`S`$ is

$$S=\underset{i=N/2}{\overset{N/2}{}}(c_{1i}c_{2i}\sqrt{m_{1i}m_{2i}})$$

The $`\sqrt{m_{1i}m_{2i}}`$ term in S normalizes the CCF so that coherent noise at $`j=0`$ is accounted for.

Here, we must point out that it is not always reliable to find the lags by the CCF, especially when the observed profiles are relatively smooth or these is strong spectral evolution. The reason, in part, is that the CCF is an average quantitative description of more than one peak in two time series. Norris et al. (1996) analyzed individual peaks by obtaining best fit positions, intensities, and widths for each energy channel. From this, we can tell if the CCF lag, indeed, tells us the lag between two energy bands. A worst case might be BATSE burst 1085. Burst 1085 was fitted with 4 pulses for channel 1 and channel 3. The peak shifts for the pulses are 0.657 s, 1.128 s, 1.181 s and $`0.160`$ s (Norris et al. (1996)). However, the CCF of the observed profile yields a time shift of 2.624 s between channel 1 and channel 3 (Cheng et al. (1995)). Another example is BATSE burst 543, which was fitted with 4 pulses for channel 1 and channel 3, and the peak shifts for the pulses are $`0.002`$, $`0.015`$, 0.06 and 0.09 s (Norris et al. (1996)), while the CCF of the observed profile yields a time shift of 0.256 s between channel 1 and channel 3 (Cheng et al. (1995)). In cases where the lags are small the CCF lag and the pulse fit lag usually agree.

Thus, pulse fitting and CCF can give very different results. One must be careful to use them appropriately. To use the CCF lag, one must always compare to a model which has calculated two energy ranges and a resulting expected CCF. The pulse fitting could provide a more direct measurement of a lag than the CCF. Unfortunately, we do not often have statistically significant samples in most of the peaks, especially in Ginga.

We will select bright GRB events from two samples: the 4th BATSE catalog and Ginga. From the current 4th BATSE catalog (Paciesas et al. (1999)), we use the 4-channel LAD DISCSC data with a time resolution of 64 ms which meet the criteria of $`T_{90}`$ $`>`$ 2s and fluence $`>`$ 5 photon cm<sup>-2</sup> s<sup>-1</sup>. We set the criteria for two main reasons: 1) short bursts are not suitable for timing analysis with a time resolution of 64 ms; 2) the strong bursts provide good statistics. This resulted in a total of 109 usable events.

The Ginga GBD (Gamma-ray Burst Detector) was in operation from March 1987 to October 1991. During this time $`120`$ GRBs were identified (Ogasaka et al. (1991), Fenimore et al. (1993)). The GRB detectors on Ginga consisted of a proportional counter (PC) sensitive to photons in the 2-to-25 keV range and a scintillation counter (SC) recording photons with energies between 15 and 350 keV. The temporal resolution of the time history data depended on the telemetry mode. The on-board trigger system was very similar to BATSE. It checked the 50-to-380 keV count rate for a significant increase ($`11\sigma `$ on either 1/8, 1/4, or 1 s time scales). Upon such a trigger, special high resolution temporal data (called “Memory Read Out” \[MRO\]) would be produced. The MRO time history has a time resolution of 0.03125 s. The PC MRO time history extends from 32 s before the trigger to 96 s after the trigger. The SC MRO time history extends from 16 s before the trigger to 48 s after the trigger. Besides the time history data, the MRO also contains spectral data recorded at 0.5 s intervals.

We selected from the 120 Ginga GRBs a sample of 19 MRO events for which statistically good light curves were available, for which the events were entirely covered by the MRO interval, and for which we could be reasonably certain that the burst occurred within the forward, $`\pi `$ steradian field of view of the detectors (front-side events.)

We selected three sets of low and upper energy ranges to calculate the spectral lags: $`CCF_{x\gamma }`$, $`CCF_{pcsc}`$ and $`CCF_{13}`$. From the Ginga sample, $`CCF_{x\gamma }`$ is based on 2-10 keV and 50-100 keV count rates from the MRO spectral data (0.5 s resolution). Also from Ginga, $`CCF_{pcsc}`$ is based on the PC count rates (2-25 keV) and the SC count rates (15-350 keV) from the MRO time histories (31.25 ms resolution). The BATSE $`CCF_{13}`$ is based on channel 1 (25-57 keV) and channel 3 (115-320 keV) and has 64 ms resolution.

Before computing the CCF, the background must be estimated and subtracted from the observed profiles to yield signal profiles. For majority of the analyzed bursts, a linear fit or quadratic fit was reasonable and it was unnecessary to propagate the background uncertainty into the CCF.

If the observed data had much finer resolution than GRB temporal features and high signal-to-noise levels, the CCF curves would be very smooth and its side lobes would be much lower than its central peak. We could find the lag by simply recording the lag of the CCF peak itself (e.g., as was done by Cheng et al. (1995)). In our actual Ginga samples, the time resolution and/or SNR are not good enough. Norris et al. (1999) measured the lag in BATSE bursts by fitting the peak of the CCF and finding the peak location from the best fit function. Neither methods provide an uncertainty of the lag. One goal of this paper is to obtain approximate uncertainties via a bootstrap method so we can determine the significance of the lags.

## 3 AVERAGE LAGS WITH APPROXIMATE UNCERTAINTIES

To obtain spectral lags with approximate uncertainties <sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1The uncertainties provide a measure of the stability of the calculation of the $`\tau `$ estimates., we did 10,000 Monte Carlo realizations from the observed time histories for each burst, and therefore got 10,000 lags for each burst by recording the lag of the CCF peak. From this method, we could find the mean lag and its approximate uncertainty (i.e., the region that includes $`68.3\%`$ of the realizations) for each burst and the average lag from all GRBs for each set of energy ranges.

For each realization, we selected a count sample for each time bin and each spectral bin from a poissonian distribution based on the observed gross counts (including background). We then removed the background and calculated the CCF. Based on the Monte Carlo realizations for each burst, we computed the average lag and its variance for each set of energy bands.

To compute the CCFs, a time interval $`T=N\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ of 32 s was used for the Ginga bursts, and $`T=N\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ of 32.768 s for the BATSE bursts. If the duration of a burst is less than the time interval, the whole profile of the burst was used.

Table 1 summarizes our results for two sets of energy bands for the Ginga bursts. The main difference between them is that $`\tau _{pcsc}`$ is based on time history MRO data (combining two samples together to give 62.5 ms resolution), and $`\tau _{x\gamma }`$ uses the spectral MRO data (0.5 sec resolution). The detailed results for BATSE GRBs are not listed in the paper. In Table 1, the burst date is given by year/month/day in the first column, the next two columns ($`\tau _{x\gamma }`$ and $`\sigma _{x\gamma }`$) are the average lag and its standard deviation for energy ranges x (2-10 keV) and $`\gamma `$ (50-100 keV). The next two columns ($`\tau _{pcsc}`$ and $`\sigma _{pcsc}`$) are the average lag and its standard deviation for energy ranges PC (2-25 keV) and SC (15-350 keV). In the last two columns we list the duration ($`T_{90}`$) and peak intensity (50-300 keV) based on the SC time histories.

Based on the $`CCF_{x\gamma }`$ from Ginga, 6 out of 19 GRBs ($`32\%`$) have detectable lags at a $`1\sigma `$ level (870707, 880205, 880725, 890929, 901001, and 910815); for $`CCF_{pcsc}`$, 5 of 19 GRBs ($`26\%`$) have the lags with $`1\sigma `$ (880205, 880725, 890929, 900126, and 910206). The difference between $`CCF_{x\gamma }`$ and $`CCF_{pcsc}`$ is not significant and is caused by the different spectral ranges and the different time resolution.

In our BATSE sample, (a): 36 out of 109 GRBs ($`33\%`$) have lags less than $`0.0+1\sigma `$ s; (b): 53 out of 109 GRBs ($`49\%`$) have lags less than $`0.064+1\sigma s`$; and (c): 20 of 109 GRBs ($`18\%`$) have lags greater than $`0.064+1\sigma `$ s. (Here, we have compared the lags against a rough combination of the quantization uncertainty \[64 ms\] and the statistical uncertainty.) The lags for class (a) are not detectable within the current time resolution; the reality of lags for class (b) are questionable because the lags are very close to the uncertainty; and the lags for class (c) are fairly reliable lags. The fraction in our sample with lags is roughly consistent with the results of Cheng et al. (1995), who claimed that about $`24\%`$ of the bursts in their sample of BATSE bursts have detectable time delay. However, Cheng et al. (1995) included a few bursts in that 25% whose lags were 0.064 s, equal to the time resolution. (Remember, Cheng et al. (1995) identified the value of the lag as which 64 ms CCF sample was the largest, so the lags had to be multiples of 64 ms.) Our criterion is more strict, requiring a lag to be at least bigger than the time resolution plus 1$`\sigma `$. Even comparing to $`0.064+1\sigma `$ s might count some events as having lags when, in fact, the lag arose from statistical variations. Thus, we probably actually found more events with lags than did Cheng et al. (1995). Also, about 10% in the sample have lags more than $`3\sigma `$ from zero, and only 4% have negative lags.

Figure 1 is the distribution of lags from the Monte Carlo realizations. There are 190,000 and 1,090,000 entries for Ginga and BATSE, respectively. These distributions are not estimates of the distribution of the true lags in the samples as might be found from pulse fitting. Rather, the distributions are very roughly a convolution of the true lag distribution with a function describing the measurement accuracy of using the CCF to estimate the lags. These distributions should only be compared to models where the lags are determined by a CCF of two energy ranges from the model. Figure 1a is the distribution of CCF lags $`\tau _{x\gamma }`$ for 19 GRBs from Ginga with a temporal resolution of 0.5 s. The mean lag for the sample is $`\tau _{x\gamma }=0.32_{0.48}^{+0.44}`$ s. Figure 1b is the distribution of lags $`\tau _{pcsc}`$ for 19 GRBs of Ginga with the temporal resolution of 0.0625 s. The mean lag for the sample is $`\tau _{pcsc}=0.19_{0.26}^{+0.32}`$ s. Figure 1c is the distribution of lags $`\tau _{13}`$ between channel 1 and channel 3 for 109 GRBs of BATSE sample with the temporal resolution of 0.064 s. The mean lag for the sample is $`\tau _{13}=0.077_{0.072}^{+0.034}`$ s.

We used an average energy to qualitatively estimate the energy range represented by the CCF lag. We assumed a power law spectra with index of $`1.5`$ and use typical response functions to estimate the average photon energy in each energy range. The average energies for BATSE’s channel 1 (25-57 keV) & channel 3 (115-320 keV) are 48 keV and 193 keV, respectively. The average lag between 48 keV and 193 keV is less than $`0.08`$ s. The average energies for Ginga’s PC (2-25 keV) & SC (15-350 keV) are 9 keV and 86 keV, respectively. The average lag between 9 keV and 86 keV is less than $``$0.5 s. The above qualitative results show that the peak of the emission is not delayed substantially at lower energy.

We note that the uncertainties of the (average) lags from Ginga are relatively large, which is mainly due to the limited signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The BATSE events have much higher SNR than Ginga’s, therefore the uncertainty of the lags for BATSE sample is relatively small.

Norris et al. (1999) has used lags from cross-correlations of BATSE data as a predictor for absolute luminosity. Based on six GRBs with known red-shifts, they found that the (isotropic) luminosity is approximately $`1.3\times (\tau _{13}/0.01\mathrm{s})^{1.14}\times 10^{53}`$ erg s<sup>-1</sup>. We calculated the lag somewhat differently than Norris et al.(1999). They included data above a fixed fraction of the highest peak and interpolate the cross-correlation function with a quadratic equation. We used the whole time history and performed Monte Carlo realizations to determine the uncertainty for the lag. In Table 2 we have analyzed four of the six BATSE GRBs with redshifts. (Only four had publicly available time histories.) The first column is the burst date, the second and third columns are the luminosity and $`\tau _{13}`$ lag as reported by Norris et al. (1999), the fourth column is our lag, the fifth column is our 1$`\sigma `$ uncertainty, the sixth column is our average lag found with a quadratic interpolation of each realization, and the last column is the 1$`\sigma `$ uncertainty found the quadratic interpolation of each realization. Note that we tend to find larger lags than Norris et al (1999) by a factor of 3 to 7. The difference is not due to the use of quadratic interpolation because that technique gives values very close to the average of many realizations (see Table 2). Perhaps the difference is due to the fact that Norris et al. (1999) takes only the tips of peaks and we use the whole time history including times when the signal is at background. In any case, it is clear that the luminosity-lag relationship is strongly dependent on how the lag is defined.

## 4 DISCUSSION

In the standard fireball scenario, the most likely radiation process in GRBs is synchrotron emission (Katz (1994); Sari, R., Narayan, R., & Piran, T. (1996)). Synchrotron emission often gives a spectral-temporal correlation $`t_{\mathrm{syn}}(E)E^{0.5}`$ which is not very different from the observed correlation $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau E^{0.45\pm 0.05}`$ (Fenimore et al. (1995)). Kazanas, Titarchuk and Hua (1998) claimed that the Fenimore et al. $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$ relationship rises from synchrotron cooling. In the synchrotron cooling model, the electrons cool, and the electron’s average energy becomes smaller, which causes the emission peaks at lower energy at later time. But, if the lags we found in this paper are caused by the cooling process, the typical magnetic field should be $`100`$ gauss. In fact, most of the current GRB models require a much strong magnetic field (e.g., Piran (1999)) which leads to very fast cooling. For example, by using typical parameters in internal shock model, the observed cooling time $`\tau _{cool}`$ at a given frequency is (Piran (1999)):

$$\tau _{cool}(h\nu )2\times 10^6\mathrm{sec}ϵ_B^{3/4}\left(\frac{h\nu _{obs}}{100\mathrm{keV}}\right)^{1/2}$$

where the dimensionless equipartition parameter $`ϵ_B`$ is the ratio of the magnetic field energy density to the total thermal energy $`e`$: $`ϵ_B=\frac{B^2}{8\pi e}`$, and its typical value is $`0.01`$. Thus, the typical cooling timescale is $`6.3\times 10^5`$ sec. We conclude that the similarity noted by Kazanas, Titarchuk and Hua (1998) between synchrotron cooling and the Fenimore et al. (1995) pulse width-energy relationship is actually a coincidence. The synchrotron cooling cannot simultaneously explain the large flux without a large magnetic field and the delays without a smaller magnetic field.

What then could produce the delays? There are three contributers to the pulse width in the external shock model of GRB pulses: cooling, hydrodynamics, and angular spreading. To produce the observed flux, the strong magnetic field produces a cooling time that is much shorter than the hydrodynamic time scale and the angular time scale. The hydrodynamic time scale is the time it takes for the reverse shock to cross the shell, $`\tau _{\mathrm{hydro}}=2\mathrm{\Gamma }_{rs}^2\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ (Kobayashi, Piran & Sari (1997)). The angular time scale is the time it takes for off axis photons to arrive at the detector, $`\tau _{\mathrm{ang}}=2\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{new}}^2\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{new}}`$ is the Lorentz factor after the two shells collide. The resulting time profile is a convolution of the three processes. The cooling time is much shorter while the hydrodynamic and angular time scales are comparable. Thus, the time structure (e.g., the lags) in the profile can only come from the hydrodynamic time (which dominates the rise of the pulse) and the angular time scale (which dominates the fall of the pulse). The angular time arises from kinematics so has no dependency on energy. Therefore, the energy dependent lags that we report here must come from variations associated with hydrodynamic processes, such as variations in emission as the reverse shock moves through the shell. Perhaps density or magnetic field variations cause the differences we observe.

We thank the referee for very extensive and detailed report on this manuscript. This work was done under the auspices of the US Department of Energy.         

Figure 1