Peak energy–isotropic luminosity correlation and jet opening angle evolution in Swift-BAT short GRBs with soft-tail emission

Abstract

Some short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) exhibit a short-duration and spectral hard emission (referred to as a “hard spike”) followed by a slightly longer soft emission (known as a “soft tail”). We identified nine SGRBs with the known redshift in the Swift/BAT gamma-ray burst catalog by specifically searching for the soft tail. We found that the spectra of these SGRBs can be described as a cutoff power-law model for the hard spike and the soft tail, and both show a time variation keeping the Epeak–Liso correlation. This suggests that the emission mechanisms of both phenomena are identical. Furthermore, we found a trend of luminosity evolution as a function of redshift. This phenomenon suggests that these bursts originate from sources that are intrinsically bright and/or energy-density-concentrated within a narrower jet at higher redshift. We demonstrate that the average jet opening angle, derived from the jet break, can be explained by considering a model based on a strongly redshift-dependent jet opening angle.