Paper detail

Is an upturn commonly seen in Fermi-LAT GRB afterglow spectra?

We analyzed 199 GRBs detected by Fermi-LAT during the years 2008-2019. We found 67 photons at energies >=10 GeV, which come from 34 GRBs. Out of these 34 GRBs, Fermi-LAT detects significant (TS>=4) afterglow 0.1-200 GeV photons from 25 GRBs. We present time-integrated 0.1-200 GeV spectra of these 25 GRBs. The spectra of a significant fraction (9/25) of these GRBs revealed a harder component above an energy break of 0.3-2 GeV. While shock synchrotron may account for the photons at the lower energy end, high energy photons above the break is naturally explained by synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission. We perform broadband model fit to the X-ray-LAT emission of GRB 131231A. Comparing the afterglow spectra of these 25 GRBs with other Fermi-LAT detected GRBs, we found that the power-law index distribution is similar for the two populations. This may indicate that the additional high-energy component may also exist in Fermi-LAT GRBs in general.