The FWHM of local pulses and the corresponding power-law index of gamma-ray burst FRED pulses

Abstract

The FWHM of gamma-ray burst (GRB) pulses is known to be related with energy by a power-law. We wonder if the power-law index $\alpha$ is related with the corresponding local pulse width $FWHM_0$. Seven FRED (fast rise and exponential decay) pulse GRBs are employed to study this issue, where six of them were interpreted recently by the relativistic curvature effect (the Doppler effect of fireballs) and the corresponding local pulses were intensely studied. A regression analysis shows an anti-correlation between $log \alpha$ and $log FWHM_0$ with a slope of $-0.37\pm0.13$. This suggests that, for the class of the GRB pulses which are consequences of the curvature effect, the difference of the local pulse width might lead to the variation of the power law index, where the smaller the width the larger the value of $\alpha$. Since the number of sources employed in this analysis is small, our result is only a preliminary one which needs to be confirmed by larger samples.