Photon Bunching at TeV Energies

Abstract

Harwit, Protheroe, and Biermann (1999) recently proposed that Bose-Einstein photon bunching might significantly affect the interpretation of Cerenkov counts of TeV gamma photons. Here, we show that a combination of two recent results of Aharonian et al. (2000) and Aharonian et al. (2001) permits us to set new, more stringent upper limits of $\lesssim 10$ on the fractional amount of photon bunching in the 7-10 TeV radiation from Markarian 501. Potential bunching at even higher energies should nevertheless continue to be investigated for this and other TeV sources, since a clear understanding of TeV energy spectra is required to unambiguously determine the spectral energy density of the mid-infrared extragalactic background.

References in corpus (4)

• The TeV Energy Spectrum of Mkn 501 Measured with the Stereoscopic Telescope System of HEGRA during 1998 and 1999
• TeV Cherenkov Events as Bose-Einstein Gamma Condensations
• Rejection of the hypothesis that Markarian 501 TeV photons are pure Bose-Einstein condensates
• A Note on TeV Cerenkov Events as Bose-Einstein Gamma Condensations