GRB 110709A, 111117A, and 120107A: Faint High-energy Gamma-Ray Photon Emission from Fermi-LAT Observations and Demographic Implications

Abstract

Launched on 2008 June 11, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has provided a rare opportunity to study high-energy photon emission from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Although the majority of such events (27) have been identified by the Fermi-LAT Collaboration, four were uncovered by using more sensitive statistical techniques. In this paper, we continue our earlier work by finding three more GRBs associated with high-energy photon emission, GRB 110709A, 111117A, and 120107A. To systematize our matched filter approach, a pipeline has been developed to identify these objects in nearly real time. GRB 120107A is the first product of this analysis procedure. Despite the reduced threshold for identification, the number of GRB events has not increased significantly. This relative dearth of events with low photon number prompted a study of the apparent photon number distribution. We find an extremely good fit to a simple power law with an exponent of –1.8 ± 0.3 for the differential distribution. As might be expected, there is a substantial correlation between the number of lower energy photons detected by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) and the number observed by LAT. Thus, high-energy photon emission is associated with some but not all of the brighter GBM events. Deeper studies of the properties of the small population of high-energy emitting bursts may eventually yield a better understanding of these entire phenomena.