Funnel Leakage of the Wien Fireball in the Early Nebula after a Binary Neutron Star Merger
A newborn neutron star (NS) that survives after a binary NS merger can inject its rotational energy into the surrounding ejecta while the ejecta are still optically thick. The injected energy is redistributed by the pair cascade, and the nebula becomes a radiation-dominated plasma composed of photons and e^+- pairs. Compton scattering then governs the energy exchange while the photon number is conserved in scattering. This nebula is evolved with a one-zone model that includes pair creation, annihilation, photon injection, diffusion, and in particular the leakage through the jet-induced polar funnel. For typical parameters, we find that the Compton parameter y is much larger than unity at early times. The nebula therefore remains in saturated Comptonization for 100 s to a few thousand seconds, depending on the magnetic field strength of the post-merger NS. The radiation field takes a Wien spectrum with a Compton equilibrium temperature. The nebula is then a so-called Wien fireball. The Compton temperature decreases from tens of keV to a few keV at early times. As long as the ejecta are optically thick, the funnel leakage is comparable to or exceeds the adiabatic loss. The funnel emission is quasi-thermal, and its isotropic-equivalent luminosity is much higher than the spin-down luminosity. We suggest that the quasi-thermal components observed in the extended emission of short gamma-ray bursts could come from the funnel leakage of the nebula fireball.