The Background of the INTEGRAL SPI Anticoincidence Shield and the Observations of GRBs

• The anti-coincidence shield, ACS, of the spectrometer, SPI (Vedrenne et al., 2003), on INTEGRAL provides the possibility to study temporal properties of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with high resolution (Rau et al. 2004). To correctly interpret the results of the analysis, a good understanding of the back,ground and noise levels of the instrument is required. The back-round noise of the ACS, oil timescales up to the length of a GRB, has a Gaussian distribution and its power is independent of frequency, that is, it is white noise. However, it does not follow a Poisson statistic since on average the variance is similar to 1.6 times larger than the mean, and varies significantly. We find a systematic relation between the mean count rate and its variance. The ratio, variance/mean, decreases as the mean count rate increases. As well as helping to understand the cause of this effect, this characterisation is useful when modelling the time variability of GRBs. To illustrate the discussion we present some GRB light curves detected by the SPI/ACS and shortly discuss the analysis that has been made of them.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Astronomi, astrofysik och kosmologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

GRBs

SPI ACS

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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