Saturated Compton Scattering Models for the Soft Gamma-Ray
Repeater Bursts
Smith, I. A., Liang, E. P., Crider, A., Lin, D., and Kusunose, M.
The Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters (SGR) are sources of brief intense
outbursts of low energy gamma rays.
Most likely they are a new manifestation of neutron stars.
In this paper, we explore Compton scattering models for the bursts.
We use a BATSE SGR 1900+14 burst to show that Comptonization by a thermal
plasma alone is unable to explain the shape of the burst spectrum, but
that adding a small but significant fraction of non-thermal plasma
produces an acceptable fit.
Status:
1997, Proceedings of the Fourth Compton Symposium Part Two,
ed. C. D. Dermer, M. S. Strickman, and J. D. Kurfess (New York: AIP), 1512.
Final version available.
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