The plateau of gamma-ray burst: hint for the solidification of quark matter?

Abstract

The origin of the shallow decay segment in λ-ray bursts’ (GRB) early light curves remains a mystery, especially those cases with a long-lived plateau followed by an abrupt falloff. In this paper, we propose to understand the origins of the long-lived plateau by considering the solidification of newborn quark stars with latent heat released as energy injection to the GRB afterglow, and we suggest that an abrupt falloff would naturally appear after the plateau due to the energy injection cutoff. We estimated the total latent heat released during the phase transition of quark stars from liquid to solid states to be on the order of ∼ 1051 ergs, which is comparable to the emission energy in the shallow decay segment. We also estimated the time scale of radiating the latent heat through thermal photon emission, and found that the time scale agrees with the observations. Based on our estimation, we analyzed the process of energy injection to GRB afterglow. We will show that the steady latent heat of quark star phase transition will continuously inject into the GRB afterglow in a form similar to that of a Poynting-flux-dominated outflow and naturally produce the shallow decay phase and the abrupt falloff after the plateau. We conclude that the latent heat of quark star phase transition is an important contribution to the shallow decay radiation in some GRB afterglows, and explains the long-lived plateau followed by an abrupt falloff, if pulsar-like stars are really (solid) quark stars.