The lag and duration–luminosity relations of gamma-ray burst pulses

Abstract

Relations linking the temporal or/and spectral properties of the prompt emission of gamma-ray bursts (hereafter GRBs) to the absolute luminosity are of great importance as they both constrain the radiation mechanisms and represent potential distance indicators. Here we discuss two such relations: the lag-luminosity relation and the newly discovered duration-luminosity relation of GRB pulses. We aim to extend our previous work on the origin of spectral lags, using the duration-luminosity relation recently discovered by Hakkila et al. to connect lags and luminosity. We also present a way to test this relation which has originally been established with a limited sample of only 12 pulses. We relate lags to the spectral evolution and shape of the pulses with a linear expansion of the pulse properties around maximum. We then couple this first result to the duration-luminosity relation to obtain the lag-luminosity and lag-duration relations. We finally use a Monte-Carlo method to generate a population of synthetic GRB pulses which is then used to check the validity of the duration-luminosity relation. Our theoretical results for the lag and duration-luminosity relations are in good agreement with the data. They are rather insensitive to the assumptions regarding the burst spectral parameters. Our Monte Carlo analysis of a population of synthetic pulses confirms that the duration-luminosity relation must be satisfied to reproduce the observational duration-peak flux diagram of BATSE GRB pulses. The newly discovered duration-luminosity relation offers the possibility to link all three quantities: lag, duration and luminosity of GRB pulses in a consistent way. Some evidence for its validity have been presented but its origin is not easy to explain in the context of the internal shock model.