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Revisiting the Redshift Evolution of GRB Luminosity Correlation with PAge Approximation
Lu Huang,1 Zhiqi Huang,1 Xiaolin Luo,1 and Yuhong Fang1
1 School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-Sen University, 2 Daxue Road, Tangjia, Zhuhai, 519082, P.R.China

ABSTRACT
arXiv:2012.02474v1 [astro-ph.CO] 4 Dec 2020

The correlation between the peak spectra energy and the equivalent isotropic energy of long gamma-
ray bursts (GRBs), the so-called Amati relation, is often used to constrain the high-redshift Hubble
diagram of the universe. Assuming Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology, Wang et al. (2017)
found a & 3σ tension in the data-calibrated Amati coefficients between low- and high-redshift GRB
samples. To test whether beyond-ΛCDM cosmology could resolve the tension, we use PAge approxi-
mation, an almost model-independent cosmology framework to revisit the redshift evolution of Amati
relation. We find that the low- and high-redshift tension of Amati relation remains at ∼ 3σ level in the
PAge framework. Thus, for the broad class of models covered by PAge approximation, caution needs
to be taken for the use of GRBs as high-redshift distance indicators.
1. INTRODUCTION Ghirlanda et al. 2004; Amati et al. 2008; Schaefer 2007;
Since the first discovery of the cosmic acceleration, Capozziello & Izzo 2008; Dainotti et al. 2008; Bernardini
Type Ia supernovae have been employed as standard et al. 2012; Amati & Della Valle 2013; Wei et al. 2014;
candles for the study of cosmic expansion and the na- Izzo et al. 2015; Demianski et al. 2017a,b). The most
ture of dark energy (Perlmutter et al. 1997, 1999; Riess popular and the most investigated GRB luminosity cor-
et al. 1998; Scolnic et al. 2018). Due to the limited relation is the empirical Amati correlation between the
intrinsic luminosity and the extinction from the inter- rest-frame spectral peak energy Ep and the bolometric
stellar medium, the maximum redshift of the SN de- isotropic-equivalent radiated energy Eiso , given by a log-
tectable is about 2.5 Strolger et al. (2015). This at the arithm linear fitting
first glance seems not to be a problem, as in the stan- Eiso Ep
log10 = a + b log10 , (1)
dard Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, dark erg 300keV
energy (cosmological constant Λ) has negligible contri- where the two calibration constants a, b are Amati co-
bution at high redshift z & 2. However, distance indi- efficients. The bolometric isotropic-equivalent radiated
cators beyond z ∼ 2 can be very useful for the purpose energy Eiso is converted from the observable bolometric
of testing dark energy models beyond ΛCDM. One of fluence Sbolo via
the attractive candidates is the long gamma-ray bursts
4πd2L Sbolo
(GRBs) that can reach up to 1048 -1053 erg in a few sec- Eiso = , (2)
1+z
onds. These energetic explosions are bright enough to
be detected up to redshift z ∼ 10 (Piran 1999; Meszaros where dL is the luminosity distance to the source.
2002, 2006; Kumar & Zhang 2014). Thus, GRBs are Equations (1-2) link the cosmological dependent dL to
often proposed as complementary tools to Type Ia su- GRB observables, with uncertainties in two folds. One
pernova observations. Due to the limited understand- source of the uncertainties arises from selection and
ing of the central engine mechanism of explosions of instrumental effects, which is typically minor (Amati
GRBs, GRBs cannot be treated as distance indicators 2006; Ghirlanda et al. 2006; Nava et al. 2012; Amati
directly. Several correlations between GRB photometric & Della Valle 2013; Demianski et al. 2017a). A more
and spectroscopic properties have been proposed to en- challenging issue is the circularity problem, which ques-
able GRBs as quasi-standard candles (Amati et al. 2002; tions whether the Amati relation calibrated in a partic-
ular cosmology can be used to distinguish cosmological
models (Kodama et al. 2008).
huangzhq25@mail.sysu.edu.cn To avoid the circularity problem, Lin et al. (2015) used
Corresponding author: Zhiqi Huang cosmologies calibrated with Type Ia supernova to in-
vestigate the GRB data. The authors considered three
2

models: ΛCDM in which the dark energy is a cosmolog- 1. At high redshift z  1, the expansion of the
ical constant, wCDM where dark energy is treated as a universe has an asymptotic matter-dominated
1 2/3
perfect fluid with a constant equation of state w, and the 1+z ∝ t behavior. (The very short radiation-
w0 -wa CDM model that parameterizes the dark energy dominated era is ignored in PAge.)
equation of state as a linear function of the scale fac-
z 2. Luminosity distance dL and comoving angular di-
tor: w = w0 + wa 1+z (Chevallier & Polarski 2001; Lin-
ameter distance dc are both monotonically increas-
der 2003). For all the three models, whose parameters
ing functions of redshift z.
are constrained by supernova data, the authors found
that the Amati coefficients calibrated by low-redshift 3. The total energy density of the universe is a mono-
(z < 1.4) GRB data is in more than 3σ tension with tonically decreasing function of time (dH/dt < 0).
those calibrated by high-redshift (z > 1.4) GRB data.
The result of Lin et al. (2015) relies on supernova data A recent work Luo et al. (2020) shows that, for most
and particular assumptions about dark energy. It is un- of the physical models in the literature, PAge can ap-
clear whether the & 3σ tension between low- and high- proximate the luminosity distances dL (z) (0 < z < 2.5)
redshift Amati coefficients indicates a problem of Amati to subpercent level. We extend the redshift range to
relation, or inconsistency between supernovae and GRB z ∼ 10 and find PAge remains to be a good approxima-
data, or failure of the dark energy models. Direct inves- tion. This is because most physical models do asymp-
1
tigation by Wang et al. (2017), using only GRB data, totically approach the 1+z ∝ t2/3 limit at high redshift,
found a similar tension between Amati coefficients at in accordance with PAge.
low and high redshifts. However, because Wang et al. Throughout this work we assume a spatially flat uni-
(2017) assumes ΛCDM cosmology, the authors could not verse, which is well motivated by inflation models and
rule out the possibility that the tension is caused by a observational constraints from cosmic microwave back-
wrong cosmology. ground.
To clarify all these problems, we study in this work
3. GRB DATA
how cosmology plays a role in the tension between low-
and high-redshift Amati coefficients. We extend the We use 180 GRB samples collected from Liu & Wei
GRB data set by including more samples from recent (2015) and Wang et al. (2016) to calibrate the Amati
publications, and use the Parameterization based on the coefficients. Following Lin et al. (2015) we use z = 1.4
cosmic Age (PAge) to cover a broad class of cosmolog- to split the low-z and high-z samples, whose Amati re-
ical models. PAge, which will be introduced below in lations are shown in Figure 1 with red dashed line and
details, is an almost model-independent scheme recently black dot-dashed line, respectively. For better visualiza-
proposed by Huang (2020) to describe the background tion we used a fixed ΛCDM cosmology with Ωm = 0.3
expansion history of the universe. and h = 0.7. It is almost visibly clear that the low-z and
high-z fittings of Amati relation have some discrepancies
2. PAGE APPROXIMATION for the fixed cosmology. To quantify this discrepancy
PAge uses three dimensionless parameters to describe and to take into account the variability of cosmologies,
the late-time expansion history of the universe. The we now proceed to describe the joint likelihood.
reduced Hubble constant h measures the current expan- For a GRB sample with
sion rate of the universe H0 = 100h km s−1 Mpc−1 . The 4πd2L Sbolo
age parameter page ≡ H0 t0 measures the cosmic age t0 in Ep 1+z ,
x := log10 , y := log10 (4)
unit of H0−1 . The η parameter characterizes the devia- 300keV erg
tion from Einstein de-Sitter universe (flat CDM model),
and uncertainties
which in PAge language corresponds to page = 23 and
σ Ep σSbolo
η = 0. The standard ΛCDM model, with Ωm = 0.3 for σx = , σy = , (5)
instance, can be well approximated by page = 0.964 and Ep ln 10 Sbolo ln 10
η = 0.373. its likelihood reads
1 dz
PAge models the Hubble expansion rate H = − 1+z dt , (y−a−bx)2
where t is the cosmological time, as −
e (
2 σ 2 +σy
int
2 +b2 σ 2
x )
H 2

H0 t

1 1
 L∝ q , (6)
=1+ 1−η − . (3) 2 + σ 2 + b2 σ 2
σint y x
H0 3 page H0 t page
This equation with η < 1, which we always enforce in where σint is an intrinsic scatter parameter representing
PAge, guarantees the following physical conditions. uncounted extra variabilities (D’Agostini 2005). The full

Figure 1. Amati relation for low- and high-redshift bins,
respectively. The red triangles with error bars are 70 low-z
(z ≤ 1.4) GRB data in our sample. The red dashed line is
their least square fitting with intercept a = 52.763 and slope
b = 1.651. The black dots and error bars are 110 high-z
(z > 1.4) GRBs data in our sample. the black dot-dashed
line is their least square fitting with intercept a = 52.763 and
slope b = 1.651. A flat ΛCDM model with Ωm = 0.3 and
h = 0.7 is assumed.
likelihood is the product of the likelihoods of all GRB
samples in the data set. It depends on five parameters
h Wang et al. (2017) for ΛCDM, turns out to be robust
page , η, a + 2 log10 0.7 , b, and σint . The dimensionless
Hubble parameter h is absorbed into the Amati coeffi-
cient a for apparent degeneracy.
We adopt a Python module emcee (Foreman-Mackey
et al. 2013) to perform Monte Carlo Markov Chain
(MCMC) analysis for the calibration. Uniform priors are
h not be an entirely bad news. The insensitivity to cosmol-
applied on page ∈ [0.84, 1.5], η ∈ [−1, 1], a + 2 log10 0.7 ∈
[52, 54], b ∈ [−1, 2] and σint ∈ [0.2, 0.5].
4. RESULTS
In Table 1, we present the posterior mean and stan-
dard deviations of PAge parameters, Amati coefficients,
as well as the intrinsic scatter σint . The marginalized
posteriors on PAge parameters page and η are fully con-
sistent with ΛCDM model. However, comparing the
marginalized constraints on the Amati coefficients from
low-z and high-z GRB samples, we find a ∼ 2.8σ tension
in the slope b and a ∼ 1.7σ difference in the intercept
h
a + 2 log10 0.7 . The joint and marginalized posteriors of
h
(a + 2 log10 0.7 , b), which are shown in Figure 2, give a
∼ 3.0σ tension between low-z and high-z GRBs.
The chains and analysis tools are uploaded to https://
zenodo.org/deposit/4301374 to allow future researchers
to reproduce our results.
5. CONCLUSIONS
By marginalizing over PAge parameters, we have ef-
fectively studied Amati relation in a very broad class
3
Figure 2. Marginalized 1σ, 2σ and 3σ contours for the
Amati coefficients a and b for low-z and high-z GRB data,
respectively.
of cosmologies. The ∼ 3σ tension between low-redshift
and high-redshift Amati coefficients, previously found in
for the broad class of models covered by PAge. Given
the possible redshift evolution of GRB luminosity cor-
relation, the use of GRBs as high-redshift distance indi-
cators may not be reliable.
The robustness of bad news, on the other hand, may
ogy of the redshift evolution of GRB luminosity correla-
tion may indicate that the redshift evolution is partially
trackable without assuming a cosmology. A straightfor-
ward method, as is done in Wang et al. (2017), is to treat
the Amati coefficients a and b as some functions of red-
shift. The disadvantage is that the choice of functions
a(z) and b(z) is somewhat arbitrary, and their Parame-
terization may introduce too many degrees of freedom.
From observational perspective, Izzo et al. (2015) pro-
poses to replace Amati relation with a more complicated
Combo correlation, which uses additional observables
from the X-ray afterglow light curve. This approach
seems to be more competitive and is now widely studied
in the literature (Luongo & Muccino 2020a,b).
Besides the PAge framework, phenomenological ex-
trapolation methods such as Taylor expansion, Padé ap-
proximations, and Gaussian process, can also be used
to calibrate GRB luminosity correlations (Lusso et al.
2019; Mehrabi & Basilakos 2020; Luongo & Muccino
2020a,b). These models typically contain many degrees
of freedom and are poorly constrained with current GRB
4
Table 1. Constraints on PAge parameters and Amati coefficients
Samples page η a + 2 log10 0.7
low-z (70 GRBs) 1.11 ± 0.18 −0.06 ± 0.57
high-z (110 GRBs) 1.14 ± 0.17 0.04 ± 0.57
all (180 GRBs) 0.93 ± 0.07 0.01 ± 0.56
data. With future increasing number of GRBs, it would
be interesting to compare them with PAge approach.
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