Time profiles and pulse structure of bright, long gamma-ray bursts using BATSE TTS data

The time profiles of many gamma-ray bursts observed by BATSE consist of distinct pulses, which offer the possibility of characterizing the temporal structure of these bursts using a relatively small set of pulse-shape parameters. This pulse analysis has previously been performed on some bright, long bursts using binned data, and on some short bursts using BATSE Time-Tagged Event (TTE) data. The BATSE Time- to-Spill (TTS) burst data records the times required to accumulate a fixed number of photons, giving variable time resolution. The spill times recorded in the TTS data behave as a gamma distribution. We have developed an interactive pulse-fitting program using the pulse model of Norris et al. and a maximum-likelihood fitting algorithm to the gamma distribution of the spill times. We then used this program to analyze a number of bright, long bursts for which TTS data is available. We present statistical information on the attributes of pulses comprising these bursts