Abstract
The jets of powerful blazars propagate within regions relatively dense of radiation produced externally to the jet. This radiation is a key ingredient to understand the origin of the high energy emission of blazars, from the X-ray to the gamma-ray energy band. These external radiation fields control the amount of the inverse Compton radiation with respect to the synchrotron flux. Therefore the predicted spectral energy distribution (SED) will depend on where the jet dissipates part of its energy to produce the observed radiation. We investigate in detail how the SED changes as a function of the location of the jet dissipation region, by assuming rather "standard" (i.e. "canonical") prescriptions for the accretion disk and its X-ray corona, the profile of the jet magnetic field and the external radiation. The magnetic energy density of a "canonical" jet almost never dominates the radiative cooling of the emitting electrons, and consequently the inverse Compton flux almost always dominates the bolometric output. This is more so for large black hole masses. Dissipation taking place beyond the broad line region is particularly interesting, since it accounts in a simple way for the largest inverse Compton to synchrotron flux ratios accompanied by an extremely hard X-ray spectrum. Furthermore it makes the high power blazars at high redshift useful tools to study the optical to UV cosmic backgrounds.
Highlights
Relativistic jets in blazars transport energy in the form of bulk motion of protons, leptons and magnetic field
We focused on high power blazars, thought to have “standard” accretion disks and broad line regions, and we did not discuss in detail the expected spectral energy distribution (SED) from low power BL Lacs
Rather than modelling single sources, we tried to propose a more general description of the emission produced by high power jets
Summary
Relativistic jets in blazars transport energy in the form of bulk motion of protons, leptons and magnetic field. The novel features of our investigation concern mainly: i) the inclusion of the X–ray corona as an important producer of target photons for the γ–γ → e± process; ii) the calculation of the emitting particle distribution, including pair creation; iii) the effects of jet acceleration at small distances from the black hole; iv) the strict link between the properties of the accretion disk and the amount of the external radiation and v) the overall scenario allowing to describe in a more general way (than done before) the SED properties of high power jets at all scales.
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