Abstract
ABSTRACT Many powerful radio quasars are associated with large-scale jets, exhibiting bright knots as shown by high-resolution images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The radio-optical flux component from these jets can be attributed to synchrotron radiation by accelerated relativistic electrons while the IC/CMB model, by far, has been the most popular explanation for the observed X-ray emission from these jets. Recently, the IC/CMB X-ray mechanism has been strongly disfavored for 3C 273 and PKS 0637–752 since the anomalously hard and steady gamma-ray emission predicted by such models violates the observational results from Fermi-LAT. Here we propose the proton synchrotron origin of the X-ray–gamma-ray flux from the knots of PKS 0637–752 with a reasonable budget in luminosity, by considering synchrotron radiation from an accelerated proton population. Moreover, for the source 3C 273, the optical data points near 1015 Hz could not be fitted using electron synchrotron. We propose an updated proton synchrotron model, including the optical data from HST, to explain the common origin of optical-X-ray–gamma-ray emission from the knots of quasar 3C 273 as an extension of the work done by Kundu & Gupta. We also show that TeV emission from large-scale quasar jets, in principle, can arise from proton synchrotron, which we discuss in the context of knot wk8.9 of PKS 0637–752.
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