2009ApJ...698..417P

Employing two samples containing of 56 and 59 well-separated fast rise and exponential decay gamma-ray burst pulses whose spectra are fitted by the Band spectrum and Compton model, respectively, we have investigated the evolutionary slope of E_p(where E_p is the peak energy in the νFν spectrum) with time during the pulse decay phase. The bursts in the samples were observed by the Burst and Transient Source Experiment on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. We first test the E_p evolutionary slope during the pulse decay phase predicted by Lu et al. based on the model of highly symmetric expanding fireballs in which the curvature effect of the expanding fireball surface is the key factor concerned. It is found that the evolutionary slopes are normally distributed for both samples and concentrated around the values of 0.73 and 0.76 for Band and Compton model, respectively, which is in good agreement with the theoretical expectation of Lu et al.. However, the inconsistency with their results is that the intrinsic spectra of most of bursts may bear the Comptonized or thermal synchrotron spectrum, rather than the Band spectrum. The relationships between the evolutionary slope and the spectral parameters are also checked. We show that the slope is correlated with E_p of time-integrated spectra as well as the photon flux but anticorrelated with the lower energy index α. In addition, a correlation between the slope and the intrinsic E_p derived by using the pseudo-redshift is also identified. The mechanisms of these correlations are unclear currently and the theoretical interpretations are required.