The updated luminosity correlations of gamma-ray bursts and cosmological implications

Several interesting luminosity correlations among gamma-ray burst (GRB) variables have been recently discussed extensively. In this paper, we derive six luminosity correlations (tau(lag)-L, V-L, E-peak-L, E-peak-E-gamma, tau(RT)-L, E-peak-E-gamma,E- iso) from the light curves and spectra of the latest 116 long GRBs, including the time lag (tau(lag)) between low and high photon energy light curves, the variability (V) of the light curve, the peak energy of the spectrum (E-peak) and the minimum rise time (tau(RT)) of the peaks. We find using the latest GRB data that the intrinsic scatter of the V-L correlation is too large and that there seems to be no inherent correlation between the two parameters. The other five correlations indeed exist when the sample is enlarged. The E-peak-E-gamma correlation has a significantly lower intrinsic scatter compared to the other correlations. We divide the full data into four redshift bins when testing possible evolution of the correlations with redshift. We find no statistically significant evidence for the redshift evolution of the luminosity correlations. To avoid the circularity problem when constraining the cosmological parameters, we simultaneously minimize chi(2) with respect to both the correlation parameters a, b and the cosmological parameters using the maximum likelihood method. For the flat Lambda CDM, the best fit is Omega(m) = 0.31(-0.10)(+0.13). We also constrain the possible evolution of the equation of state (EOS) of the dark energy using the GRBs together with the Union2 compilation of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the H(z) data. The result is consistent with the cosmological constant at 2 sigma confidence level and, mainly due to the GRB data, the dark energy EOS shows slight deviation from -1 at z >= 0.5 as was persistently presented in many previous data sets.