Bruce GRB Wiki

The theoretical basis of the GRB blast wave can be simply described (first para section 2 Nava+12 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.2806.pdf) by these phases (Somehow Nava starts the numbering sequence after acceleration, but I wanted to add it, so I put in a phase 0):

Flux_bol ~ t^2 (Ackerman+13 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.2908v1.pdf) … or t^(2-s), s the density profile index, in Nava+12.

There can be adiabatic and radiative sub-phases.

(The famous Blandford & McKee (1976) is the self–similar solution during the relativistic deceleration phase of adiabatic blast waves.)

This is where most emission takes place; it

(The famous Sedov–Taylor solution (Sedov 1946; Taylor 1950; von Neumann 1947) holds in non-rel regime.)

This is here because although complicated, it relates to BLF measurement and the borderline between prompt and afterglow.

An important paper here is Liang et al.2012 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?arXiv:1210.5142 is a big study of optical afterglows (AGs) presenting distributions and correlations of this optical afterglow peak time method.

'X-ray (XRT) AGs are often flare-dominated at early times'; they are not peaks plus smooth decays - very complicated — they show lots of flares, etc. in the transition from prompt to AG and even at very late times.

'Optical re-brightening' is common and energetically significant; this is 1e4 s (not to be confused with the SN signal in ~ 2 weeks).

Optical AGs shows flares, usually not as dramatic as XRT, but then they have very large, major re-brightenings. Liang+12 found of 146 optical well-measured GRB, 38 optical onset bumps and 47 re-brighting bumps. The re-brightening bumps are probably a structured jet viewed on-axis. The KE of the re-brightening bumps are similar to the onset bumps, but the BLFs are much lower. So, re-brightening is a jet phenomenon, and therefore important and GRB-like.