No Arabic abstract
The existing correlation between BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) and cosmic-ray events observed by HiRes experiment provide sufficient information to formulate quantitatively the hypothesis about the flux of neutral cosmic-ray particles originated from BL Lacs. We determine the potential of future cosmic ray experiments to test this hypothesis by predicting the number of coincidences between arrival directions of cosmic rays and positions of BL Lacs on the celestial sphere, which should be observed in the future datasets. We find that the early Pierre Auger data will not have enough events to address this question. On the contrary, the final Pierre Auger data and the early Telescope Array data will be sufficient to fully test this hypothesis. If confirmed, it would imply the existence of highest-energy neutral particles coming from cosmological distances.
We present the spectral signatures of the Bethe-Heitler pair production ($pe$) process on the spectral energy distribution (SED) of blazars, in scenarios where the hard $gamma$-ray emission is of photohadronic origin. If relativistic protons interact with the synchrotron blazar photons producing $gamma$ rays through photopion processes, we show that, besides the $2-20$ PeV neutrino emission, the typical blazar SED should have an emission feature due to the synchrotron emission of $pe$ secondaries that bridges the gap betweeen the low-and high-energy humps of the SED, namely in the energy range 40 keV-40 MeV. We first present analytical expressions for the photopion and $pe$ loss rates in terms of observable quantities of blazar emission. For the $pe$ loss rate in particular, we derive a new approximate analytical expression for the case of a power-law photon distribution, which has an excellent accuracy with the numerically calculated exact one, especially at energies above the threshold for pair production. We show that for typical blazar parameters, the photopair synchrotron emission emerges in the hard X-ray/soft $gamma$-ray energy range with a characteristic spectral shape and non negligible flux, which may be even comparable to the hard $gamma$-ray flux produced through photopion processes. We argue that the expected $pe$ bumps are a natural consequence of leptohadronic models, and as such, they may indicate that blazars with a three-hump SED are possible emitters of high-energy neutrinos.
We explain the observed multiwavelength photon spectrum of a number of BL Lac objects detected at very high energy (VHE, $E gtrsim 30$ GeV), using a lepto-hadronic emission model. The one-zone leptonic emission is employed to fit the synchrotron peak. Subsequently, the SSC spectrum is calculated, such that it extends up to the highest energy possible for the jet parameters considered. The data points beyond this energy, and also in the entire VHE range are well explained using a hadronic emission model. The ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs, $Egtrsim 0.1$ EeV) escaping from the source interact with the extragalactic background light (EBL) during propagation over cosmological distances to initiate electromagnetic cascade down to $sim1$ GeV energies. The resulting photon spectrum peaks at $sim1$ TeV energies. We consider a random turbulent extragalactic magnetic field (EGMF) with a Kolmogorov power spectrum to find the survival rate of UHECRs within 0.1 degrees of the direction of propagation in which the observer is situated. We restrict ourselves to an RMS value of EGMF, $B_{rm rms}sim 10^{-5}$ nG, for a significant contribution to the photon spectral energy distribution (SED) from UHECR interactions. We found that UHECR interactions on the EBL and secondary cascade emission can fit gamma-ray data from the BL Lacs we considered at the highest energies. The required luminosity in UHECRs and corresponding jet power are below the Eddington luminosities of the super-massive black holes in these BL Lacs.
Previously suggested correlations of BL Lac type objects with the arrival directions of the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray primaries are tested by making use of the HiRes stereoscopic data. The results of the study support the conclusion that BL Lacs may be the cosmic ray sources and suggest the presence of a small (a few percent) fraction of neutral primaries at E>10^{19} eV.
Detailed VLA observations have been gathered for a number of sources classified as either BL Lacs or galaxies, derived from the REX survey. We focus in particular on the sources identified by us, for which we have in hand homogeneous optical data, to study in more detail than allowed by the NVSS the radio properties of these sources in the framework of AGN unified models.
We present the results of our study of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of a sample of ten low- to intermediate-synchrotron-peaked blazars. We investigate some of the physical parameters most likely responsible for the observed short-term variations in blazars. To do so, we focus on the study of changes in the SEDs of blazars corresponding to changes in their respective optical fluxes. We model the observed spectra of blazars from radio to optical frequencies using a synchrotron model that entails a log-parabolic distribution of electron energies. A significant correlation among the two fitted spectral parameters ($a$, $b$) of log-parabolic curves and a negative trend among the peak frequency and spectral curvature parameter, $b$, emphasize that the SEDs of blazars are fitted well by log-parabolic curves. On considering each model parameter that could be responsible for changes in the observed SEDs of these blazars, we find that changes in the jet Doppler factors are most important.