Speaker
Description
Synchrotron radiation has been for decades the main candidate to explain prompt emission in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), while shocks have been widely employed as dissipation mechanisms. Although most GRB detectors, such as BAT, are sensitive to energies starting from ~10 keV, the emission in soft X-rays, such as detected by Swift's XRT, and optical wavelengths is also crucial to understand and model the bursts' spectral shapes. From a dissipation perspective, the formation and propagation of internal shocks upon the collision of shells within the relativistic jet of a GRB is a natural byproduct of the jet’s varying speeds. We thus employ a synchrotron model which considers the contributions of both reverse and forward shocks, extending the emission to X-rays and optical wavelengths. We discuss the implications of our model for the current state of observations, the changes brought upon by varying our parameter space, and compare our results to similar approaches where Band-like functions are used to model the prompt emission.
