Creation of Electron--Positron Wind in Gamma-Ray Bursts and Its Effect on the Early Afterglow Emission

Abstract

We calculate the creation of electron--positron pairs in Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) resulting from the collision between scattered and outward moving gamma-ray photons. The number of pairs exceeds the number of ambient medium electrons encountered by the GRB ejecta up to ~ 10^{16} cm from the center of explosion. The shock resulting from the interaction of the ejecta with the pair-wind may brighten the afterglow synchrotron emission during the first few minutes. Even without this effect, the peak intensity of the optical afterglow increases with the density of the surrounding medium. Therefore, observations of the optical flux at early times constrain the density of the circumburst medium. If the electron and magnetic field energies behind the forward shock sweeping-up the pair-wind and the circumburst medium are as inferred from fits to the broadband afterglow emission at 0.5-100 days, then the current upper limits on the optical counterpart emission, set by the ROTSE and LOTIS experiments, indicate that the circumburst medium within 0.01 pc is less dense than 100 cm^{-3} or, if a wind, corresponds to a progenitor mass-loss to wind speed ratio below 10^{-6} M_sun/yr/(1000 km/s).