Limitations on the Photo-disintegration Process as a Source of VHE Photons

Abstract

We consider whether photo-disintegration is ever able to provide an effective mechanism for the production of VHE $\gamma$-ray emission from astrophysical sources. We find that the efficiency of this process is always smaller by a factor $A/Z^2$ ($\sim 4/A$) than that of nuclei cooling through Bethe-Heitler pair-production. Furthermore, for sources optically thin to TeV emission, we find that the efficiency of this process can be no more than $3\times 10^{-5}(R_{\mathrm{source}}/R_{\mathrm{Larmor}})$, where $R_{\mathrm{source}}$ is the source size and $R_{\mathrm{Larmor}}$ is the CR nuclei Larmor radius. We conclude that this process is unable to provide an effective mechanism for VHE $\gamma$-ray emission from astrophysical sources.

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

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• Photodisintegration of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays revisited
• TeV gamma-rays and neutrinos from photo-disintegration of nuclei in Cygnus OB2
• High energy cosmic-rays: puzzles, models, and giga-ton neutrino telescopes

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