Gamma-ray Luminosity and Photon Index Evolution of FSRQ Blazars and Contribution to the Gamma-ray Background

Abstract

We present the redshift evolutions and distributions of the gamma-ray luminosity and photon spectral index of flat spectrum radio quasar (FSRQ) type blazars, using non-parametric methods to obtain the evolutions and distributions directly from the data. The sample we use for analysis consists of almost all FSRQs observed with a greater than approximately 7 sigma detection threshold in the first year catalog of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's Large Area Telescope, with redshfits as determined from optical spectroscopy by Shaw et al. We find that FSQRs undergo rapid gamma-ray luminosity evolution, but negligible photon index evolution, with redshift. With these evolutions accounted for we determine the density evolution and luminosity function of FSRQs, and calculate their total contribution to the extragalactic gamma-ray background radiation, resolved and unresolved, which is found to be 16(+10/-4)%, in agreement with previous studies.

9 pages, 10 figures, Accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• The Fermi-LAT high-latitude Survey: Source Count Distributions and the Origin of the Extragalactic Diffuse Background
• Cosmic Gamma-Ray Background from Star-Forming Galaxies
• Statistics of Cosmological Black Hole Jet Sources: Blazar Predictions for GLAST
• Contribution from Star-Forming Galaxies to the Cosmic Gamma-Ray Background Radiation

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• A flexible method for estimating luminosity functions via Kernel Density Estimation
• The Mid-Infrared Luminosity Evolution and Luminosity Function of Quasars with SDSS and WISE
• Transient QPOs of Fermi-LAT blazars under the Curved Jet Model
• On The Relation Between the AGN Jet and Accretion Disk Emissions
• Detection of Low-Redshift Excess in Supernova-Linked Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Source Count Distribution of Fermi LAT Gamma-Ray Blazars Using Novel Nonparametric Methods
• The Gamma-ray Luminosity Function of Flat-Spectrum Radio Quasars
• A flexible method for estimating luminosity functions via Kernel Density Estimation -- II. Generalization and Python implementation