Synchrotron Self-Compton Emission from External Shocks as the Origin of the Sub-TeV Emission in GRB 180720B and GRB 190114C

Recently, very high-energy photons above 100 GeV were reported to be detected from GRB 190114C and GRB 180720B at, respectively, 100-1000 s and 10 hr after the burst. We model the available broadband data of both GRBs with the synchrotron plus synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission of the afterglow shocks. We find that the sub-TeV emission of GRB 180720B can be interpreted as the SSC emission from afterglow shocks expanding in a constant-density circumburst medium. The SSC emission of GRB 190114C dominates over the synchrotron component from GeV energies at ∼100 s, which can explain the possible hard spectrum of the GeV emission at this time. The extrapolated flux of this SSC component to sub-TeV energies can explain the high-significance detection of GRB 190114C by the MAGIC telescope. The parameter values (such as the circumburst density and shock microphysical parameters) in the modeling are not unusual for both gamma-ray bursts, implying that the detection of sub-TeV photons from these two bursts should be attributed to their large burst energies and low redshifts.