The role of photon scattering in shaping the lightcurves and spectra of gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

We analyze the power spectra of the lightcurves of long gamma-ray bursts, dividing the sample in bins of luminosity, using the recently discovered variability-luminosity correlation. We find that the value of the variability parameter strongly correlates with the frequency that contains most of the power in the burst comoving frame. We compute the average power spectra in luminosity bins. The average power spectrum is well described by a broken power-low and the break frequency is a function of the variability parameter, while the two slopes are roughly constant. This allow us to conclude that scattering processes do not play a relevant role in modelling the lightcurves. We finally discuss in which conditions scattering may still play a relevant role in shaping the spectra of GRBs.