Gamma-Ray Bursters (GRBs)

Gamma-ray bursters are unknown sources of short bursts of gamma-rays.

Introduction

We do not really know about and understand Gamma-ray bursters. We can guess about them and most people subscribe to the cosmological model. (See GRBs page, GRB angular distribution page, and GRB spectra for support given to the cosmological models.) Cosmological GRBs are expected to produce relativistic fireballs with temperature on order of 100 MeV and an expanding shock wave shell with relativistic factor of about 100. On the order of a solar mass is converted to this fireball on a time scale of roughly a second.

GRBs are expected to produce significant fluxes of neutrinos from the approximately 100 MeV thermal spectrum and from accelerated protons producing pions by photoproduction on the radiations fields present. These radiation fields include, the thermal radiation, synchrotron radiation for accelerated electrons, Compton-up-converted versions of these original fields.

The detection of neutrinos from GRBs would help immensely in understanding the highly relativistic phenomenon.

Scientific Motivation

We can learn much about GRBs from detecting their neutrinos and the sharp time duration of the pulses allow a number of interesting neutrino physics experiments and tests of relativity and observations of relativistic phenomena.

more to come this is a place holder

Concept

One does a coincidence with monitors for GRBs (i.e. Gamma-Ray Burst Timing Network ) for neutrino events pointing in the same direction and near the same time for each GRB.

Reference to Papers relating to detecting neutrino from GRBs:

KM3 Project

KM3 a telescope designed to detect and identify point sources of high-energy (greater than 1 TeV) neutrinos

More Information

This page is currently under construction.)


Return to the Neutrino (KM3) Page
Return to the Smoot Group page for a complete description of Dr. Smoot's group's research activities.