No Arabic abstract
Over the last 15 years there has been considerable interest in the possibility of quantum-gravity-induced in-vacuo dispersion, the possibility that spacetime itself might behave essentially like a dispersive medium for particle propagation. Two very recent studies have exposed what might be in-vacuo dispersion features for GRB (gamma-ray-burst) neutrinos of energy in the range of 100 TeV and for GRB photons with energy in the range of 10 GeV. We here show that these two features are roughly compatible with a description such that the same effects apply over 4 orders of magnitude in energy. We also characterize quantitatively how rare it would be for such features to arise accidentally, as a result of (still unknown) aspects of the mechanisms producing photons at GRBs or as a result of background neutrinos accidentally fitting the profile of a GRB neutrino affected by in-vacuo dispersion.
Some recent studies exposed rather strong statistical evidence of in-vacuo-dispersion-like spectral lags for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), a linear correlation between time of observation and energy of GRB particles. Those results focused on testing in-vacuo dispersion for the most energetic GRB particles, and in particular only included photons with energy at emission greater than 40 GeV. We here extend the window of the statistical analysis down to 5 GeV and find results that are consistent with what had been previously noticed at higher energies.
Previous researches on high-energy neutrino events from gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) suggest a neutrino speed variation $v(E)=c(1pm E/E^{ u}_{mathrm{LV}})$ with ${E}^{ u}_{rm LV}=(6.4pm 1.5)times10^{17}~{ rm GeV}$, together with an intrinsic time difference ${Delta {t}_{rm in}=(-2.8pm 0.7)times10^2~{rm s}}$, which means that high-energy neutrinos come out about 300~s earlier than low-energy photons in the source reference system. Considering the possibility that pre-bursts of neutrinos may be accompanied by high-energy photons, in this work we search for high-energy photon events with earlier emission time from 100 to 1000~s before low-energy photons at source by analyzing Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) data. We perform the searching of photon events with energies larger than 100~MeV, and find 14 events from 48 GRBs with known redshifts. Combining these events with a $1.07~rm{TeV}$ photon event observed by the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescopes (MAGIC), we suggest a pre-burst stage with a long duration period of several minutes of high energy neutrino emissions accompanied by high energy photons at the GRB source.
We present a covariant ray tracing algorithm for computing high-resolution neutrino distributions in general relativistic numerical spacetimes with hydrodynamical sources. Our formulation treats the very important effect of elastic scattering of neutrinos off of nuclei and nucleons (changing the neutrinos direction but not energy) by incorporating estimates of the background neutrino fields. Background fields provide information about the spectra and intensities of the neutrinos scattered into each ray. These background fields may be taken from a low-order moment simulation or be ignored, in which case the method reduces to a standard state-of-the-art ray tracing formulation. The method handles radiation in regimes spanning optically thick to optically thin. We test the new code, highlight its strengths and weaknesses, and apply it to a simulation of a neutron star merger to compute neutrino fluxes and spectra, and to demonstrate a neutrino flavor oscillation calculation. In that environment, we find qualitatively different fluxes, spectra, and oscillation behaviors when elastic scattering is included.
We present the results of a LIGO search for gravitational waves (GWs) associated with GRB 051103, a short-duration hard-spectrum gamma-ray burst (GRB) whose electromagnetically determined sky position is coincident with the spiral galaxy M81, which is 3.6 Mpc from Earth. Possible progenitors for short-hard GRBs include compact object mergers and soft gamma repeater (SGR) giant flares. A merger progenitor would produce a characteristic GW signal that should be detectable at the distance of M81, while GW emission from an SGR is not expected to be detectable at that distance. We found no evidence of a GW signal associated with GRB 051103. Assuming weakly beamed gamma-ray emission with a jet semi-angle of 30 deg we exclude a binary neutron star merger in M81 as the progenitor with a confidence of 98%. Neutron star-black hole mergers are excluded with > 99% confidence. If the event occurred in M81 our findings support the the hypothesis that GRB 051103 was due to an SGR giant flare, making it the most distant extragalactic magnetar observed to date.
Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves (GW) and high-energy neutrinos (HEN). Both GWs and HENs may escape very dense media and travel unaffected over cosmological distances, carrying information from the innermost regions of the astrophysical engines. Such messengers could also reveal new, hidden sources that have not been observed by conventional photon-based astronomy. Coincident observation of GWs and HENs may thus play a critical role in multimessenger astronomy. This is particularly true at the present time owing to the advent of a new generation of dedicated detectors: IceCube, ANTARES, VIRGO and LIGO. Given the complexity of the instruments, a successful joint analysis of this data set will be possible only if the expertise and knowledge of the data is shared between the two communities. This review aims at providing an overview of both theoretical and experimental state-of-the-art and perspectives for such a GW+HEN multimessenger astronomy.