An X-ray view of the INTEGRAL/IBIS blazars

Abstract

Aim of this work is a broad-band study with INTEGRAL, Swift and XMM-Newton satellites of a sample of 9 blazars (7 FSRQ and 2 BL Lac) with redshift up to about 4. The spectral analysis has shown clear evidence of a flattening of the continuum towards the low energies ($E<3$ keV observer frame). This behaviour is well reproduced both with an absorbed power-law model ($N_H\sim 10^{20}$-$10^{23}$ cm${}^{-2}$ in the rest-frame of the sources) or a broken power-law continuum model (with an energy break below 3 keV in the observer-frame). No Compton reflection features, Fe $K\hat{I}\pm$ line and hump at high energies, have been detected, with the exception of the source IGR J22517+2218 that shows the presence of a weak iron line. In this work we also investigate a possible correlation between the absorption column density $N_H$ and the red-shift. We confirm the existence of a $N_H$-z trend, with the higher absorption at z$>$2 for a larger sample compared to previous results. The distribution of the $N_H$ and the photon index $\hat{I}“$ is also presented. The hard X-ray data allow us to detect highly absorbed sources (with $N_H\ge 10^{23}$cm${}^{-2}$ in rest-frame of the source) characterized by photon index distribution peaked at harder values ($\hat{I}“\sim 1.4$) with respect to that obtained with XMM data only ($\hat{I}“\sim 2$).

accepted for publication in MNRAS