Abstract
The ongoing systematic search for sources of extragalactic gamma rays has now revealed many blazars in which the very high energy output can not consistently be described as synchrotron self-Compton radiation. In this paper a self consistent hybrid model is described, explaining the very high energy radiation of those blazars as proton synchrotron radiation accompanied by photo-hadronic cascades. As the model includes all relevant radiative processes it naturally includes the synchrotron self-Compton case as well, depending on the chosen parameters. This paper focuses on rather high magnetic fields to be present within the jet, hence the hadronically dominated case. To discriminate the hadronic scenario against external photon fields being upscattered within the jet to produce the dominating gamma-ray output, the temporal behavior of blazars may be exploited with the presented model. Variability reveals both, the highly non-linear nature caused by the photohadronic cascades and typical timescales as well as fingerprints in the inter-band lightcurves of the involved hadrons. The modeling of two individual sources is shown : 1 ES 1011+496, a high frequency peaked blazar at redshift z = 0:212, which is well described within the hybrid scenario using physically reasonable parameters. The short term variability of the second example, namely 3C 454.3, a Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar at z = 0:859, reveals the limitations of the gamma-rays being highly dominated by proton synchrotron radiation.
Highlights
When high magnetic fields are present within the jet of 1 ES 1011+496 the first hump can be explained by primary e−, but one has to account for p+ acceleration as well, making them relevant emitters in the jet
External radiation might play an important role in those cases, see e.g. [12, 13], or protons are already at very high energies when injected into the considered region
This discussion is closely related to the investigations on the location of the very high energy (VHE) emitting site within the relativistic outflow, see e.g. [5, 6]
Summary
In this paper a self consistent, time-dependent hybrid model co-accelerating electrons and protons due to diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) at the very same site, while taking all the relevant loss processes into account is introduced. The model can be applied to all blazar flavors, with the dominating particle species determined unbiasedly during the reproduction of the provided MWL data. In the last section the conclusions, especially in context of other observational discriminators between leptonically and hadronically dominated sources as well as consequences for observable time-scales, are drawn. It should be noted that the discussion on the dominating particle species within AGN jets is highly correlated to possible sources of extragalactic cosmic rays, and to the debate on the location of the emitting site and possible envelope structure of the blazar sequence mentioned above
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