No Arabic abstract
There are still some important unanswered questions about the detailed particle acceleration and escape occurring during the quiescent epoches. As a result, the particle distribution that is adopted in the blazar quiescent spectral model have numerous unconstrained shapes. To help remedy this problem, we introduce a analytical particle transport model to reproduce quiescent broadband spectral energy distribution of blazar. In this model, the exact electron distribution is solved from a generalized transport equation that contains the terms describing first-order and secondary-order emph{Fermi} acceleration, escape of particle due to both the advection and spatial diffusion, energy losses due to synchrotron emission and inverse-Compton scattering of an assumed soft photon field. We suggest that the advection is a significant escape mechanism in blazar jet. We find that in our model the advection process tends to harden the particle distribution, which enhances the high energy components of resulting synchrotron and synchrotron self-Comptom spectrum from jet. Our model is able to roughly reproduce the observed spectra of extreme BL Lac object 1ES 0414+009 with reasonable assumptions about the physical parameters.
We present a model of the spectra of gamma-ray emitting blazars in which a single homogeneous emission region both emits synchrotron photons directly and scatters them to high (gamma-ray) energy before emission (a ``synchrotron self-Compton or SSC model). In contrast to previous work, we follow the full time dependent evolution of the electron and photon spectra, assuming a power-law form of the electron injection and examine the predictions of the model with regard to variability of the source. We apply these computations to the object Mkn 421, which displayed rapid variability in its X-ray and TeV emission during a multiwavelength campaign in 1994. This observation strongly implies that the same population of electrons produces the radiation in both energy bands. By fitting first the observed quiescent spectrum over all 18 orders of magnitude in frequency, we show that the time dependence of the keV/TeV flare could have been the result of a sudden increase in the maximum energy of the injected electrons. We show also that different types of flare may occur in this object and others, and that the energy band most sensitive to the properties of the acceleration mechanism is the X-ray band.
We extend previous work on gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows involving hot thermal electrons at the base of a shock-accelerated tail. Using a physically-motivated electron distribution based on first-principles simulations, we compute broadband emission from radio to TeV gamma-rays. For the first time, we present the effects of a thermal distribution of electrons on synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission. The presence of thermal electrons causes temporal and spectral structure across the entire observable afterglow, which is substantively different from models that assume a pure power-law distribution for the electrons. We show that early-time TeV emission is enhanced by more than an order of magnitude for our fiducial parameters, with a time-varying spectral index that does not occur for a pure power law of electrons. We further show that the X-ray closure relations take a very different, also time-dependent, form when thermal electrons are present; the shape traced out by the X-ray afterglows is a qualitative match to observations of the traditional decay phase.
The jets of blazars are renowned for their multi-wavelength flares and rapid extreme variability; however, there are still some important unanswered questions about the physical processes responsible for these spectral and temporal changes in emission properties. In this paper, we develop a time-dependent particle evolution model for the time-varying emission spectrum of blazars. In the model, we introduce time-dependent electric and magnetic fields, which consistently include the variability of relevant physical quantities in the transport equation. The evolution on the electron distribution is numerically solved from a generalized transport equation that contains the terms describing the electrostatic, first-order and second-order emph{Fermi} acceleration, escape of particles due to both advection and spatial diffusion, as well as energy losses due to the synchrotron emission and inverse-Compton scattering of both synchrotron and external ambient photon fields. We find that the light curve profiles of blazars are consistent with the particle spectral evolution resulting from time-dependent electric and magnetic fields, rather than the effects of the acceleration or the cooling processes. The proposed model is able to simultaneously account for the variability of both the energy spectrum and the light curve profile of the BL Lac object Mrk 421 with reasonable assumptions about the physical parameters. The results strongly indicate that the magnetic field evolution in the dissipated region of a blazar jet can account for the variabilities.
We present near-infrared polarimetric observations of the black hole X-ray binaries Swift J1357.2-0933 and A0620-00. In both sources, recent studies have demonstrated the presence of variable infrared synchrotron emission in quiescence, most likely from weak compact jets. For Swift J1357.2-0933 we find that the synchrotron emission is polarized at a level of 8.0 +- 2.5 per cent (a 3.2 sigma detection of intrinsic polarization). The mean magnitude and rms variability of the flux (fractional rms of 19-24 per cent in K_s-band) agree with previous observations. These properties imply a continuously launched (stable on long timescales), highly variable (on short timescales) jet in the Swift J1357.2-0933 system in quiescence, which has a moderately tangled magnetic field close to the base of the jet. We find that for A0620-00, there are likely to be three components to the optical-infrared polarization; interstellar dust along the line of sight, scattering within the system, and an additional source that changes the polarization position angle in the reddest (H and K_s) wave-bands. We interpret this as a stronger contribution of synchrotron emission, and by subtracting the line-of-sight polarization, we measure an excess of ~ 1.25 +- 0.28 per cent polarization and a position angle of the magnetic field vector that is consistent with being parallel with the axis of the resolved radio jet. These results imply that weak jets in low luminosity accreting systems have magnetic fields which possess similarly tangled fields compared to the more luminous, hard state jets in X-ray binaries.
Relativistic jets launched by rotating black holes are powerful emitters of non-thermal radiation. Extraction of the rotational energy via electromagnetic stresses produces magnetically-dominated jets, which may become turbulent. Studies of magnetically-dominated plasma turbulence from first principles show that most of the accelerated particles have small pitch angles, i.e. the particle velocity is nearly aligned with the local magnetic field. We examine synchrotron-self-Compton radiation from anisotropic particles in the fast cooling regime. The small pitch angles reduce the synchrotron cooling rate and promote the role of inverse Compton (IC) cooling, which can occur in two different regimes. In the Thomson regime, both synchrotron and IC components have soft spectra, $ u F_ upropto u^{1/2}$. In the Klein-Nishina regime, synchrotron radiation has a hard spectrum, typically $ u F_ upropto u$, over a broad range of frequencies. Our results have implications for the modelling of BL Lacs and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). BL Lacs produce soft synchrotron and IC spectra, as expected when Klein-Nishina effects are minor. The observed synchrotron and IC luminosities are typically comparable, which indicates a moderate anisotropy with pitch angles $thetagtrsim0.1$. Rare orphan gamma-ray flares may be produced when $thetall0.1$. The hard spectra of GRBs may be consistent with synchrotron radiation when the emitting particles are IC cooling in the Klein-Nishina regime, as expected for pitch angles $thetasim0.1$. Blazar and GRB spectra can be explained by turbulent jets with a similar electron plasma magnetisation parameter, $sigma_{rm e}sim10^4$, which for electron-proton plasmas corresponds to an overall magnetisation $sigma=(m_{rm e}/m_{rm p})sigma_{rm e}sim10$.