A Robust Estimation of Lorentz Invariance Violation and Intrinsic Spectral Lag of Short Gamma-Ray Bursts

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been identified as one of the most promising sources for Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) studies due to their cosmological distance and energetic emission in wide energy bands. However, the arrival-time difference of GRB photons among different energy bands is affected not only by the LIV effect but also by the poorly known intrinsic spectral lags. In previous studies, assumptions of spectral lag have to be made which could introduce systematic errors. In this paper, we used a sample of 46 short GRBs (SGRBs), whose intrinsic spectra lags are much smaller than long GRBs, to better constrain the LIV. The observed spectral lags are derived between two fixed energy bands in the source rest frame rather than the observer frame. Moreover, the lags are calculated with the novel Li–CCF method, which is more robust than traditional methods. Our results show that, if we consider LIV as a linear energy dependence of the photon propagation speed in the data fit, then we obtain a robust limit of E QG > 1015 GeV (95% CL). If we assume no LIV effect in the keV–MeV energy range, the goodness of data fit is equivalently as well as the case with LIV and we can constrain the common intrinsic spectral lags of SGRBs to be 1.4 ± 0.5 ms (1σ), which is the most accurate measurement thus far.

A Comprehensive Study of Multiflare GRB Spectral Lag

We select 48 multiflare gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) (including 137 flares) from the Swift/XRT database and estimate the spectral lag with the discrete correlation function. It is found that 89.8% of the flares have positive lags and only 9.5% of the flares show negative lags when fluctuations are taken into account. The median lag of the multiflares (2.75 s) is much greater than that of GRB pulses (0.18 s), which can be explained by the fact that we confirm that multiflare GRBs and multipulse GRBs have similar positive lag–duration correlations. We investigate the origin of the lags by checking the E peak evolution with the two brightest bursts and find the leading models cannot explain all of the multiflare lags and there may be other physical mechanisms. All of the results above reveal that X-ray flares have the same properties as GRB pulses, which further supports the observation that X-ray flares and GRB prompt-emission pulses have the same physical origin.