Counting on Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: Gravitational-wave Constraints of Jet Geometry
Amanda Farah, Reed Essick, Zoheyr Doctor, Maya Fishbach, Daniel E. Holz
Abstract
Abstract The detections of GW170817 and GRB 170817A revealed that at least some short gamma-ray bursts (sGRB) are associated with the merger of neutron-star compact binaries. The gamma-rays are thought to result from the formation of collimated jets, but the details of this process continue to elude us. One important feature of gamma-ray bursts is the emission profile of the jet as a function of viewing angle. We present two related methods to measure the effective angular width, , of sGRB jets using gravitational-wave (GW) and gamma-ray data, assuming all sGRBs have the same angular dependence for their luminosities. The first is a counting experiment that requires minimal knowledge about each event, beyond whether or not they were detected in gamma-rays. The second method uses GW and electromagnetic data to estimate parameters of the source. We additionally outline a model-independent method to infer the full jet structure of sGRBs using a nonparametric approach. Applying our methods to GW170817 and GW190425, we find weak constraints on the sGRB luminosity profile. We project that with 5 and 100 binary neutron star detections, the counting method would constrain the relative uncertainty in to within and , respectively. Incorporating GW parameter estimation provides only marginal improvements. We conclude that the majority of the information about jet structure comes from the relative sensitivities of GW and gamma-ray detectors as encoded in simple counting experiments.