Automatic Quenching of High-Energy γ-Ray Sources by Synchrotron Photons
By Ł. Stawarz, John G. Kirk. 2007
211 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We investigate a magnetized plasma in which injected high-energy γ-rays annihilate on a soft photon field that is provided by the synchrotron radiation of the created pairs. For a very wide range of magnetic fields, this process involves γ-rays between 0.3 GeV and 30 TeV. We derive a simple dynamical system for this process, analyze its stability to runaway production of soft photons and pairs, and find conditions for it to automatically quench by reaching a steady state with an optical depth to photon-photon annihilation larger than unity. We discuss applications to broadband γ-ray emitters, in particular supermassive black holes. Automatic quenching limits the γ-ray luminosity of these objects and predicts substantial pair loading of the jets of less active sources.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b34dd93499139a9e6ff5b6dcb804742ae99aeff8
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Population X: Are the super-Eddington X-ray sources beamed jets in microblazars or intermediate mass black holes? (2001, methodology): “Synchrotron and inverse Compton emission from the jet could also be produced in the X-rays for low/hard and high/soft states (Markoff, Falcke, & Fender 2001; Markoff et al. 2001).”