Automatic quenching of high energy gamma-ray sources by synchrotron photons

Abstract

We investigate a magnetized plasma in which injected high energy gamma-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 gamma-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 paris, 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 broad-band gamma-ray emitters, in particular supermassive black holes. Automatic quenching limits the gamma-ray luminosity of these objects and predicts substantial pair loading of the jets of less active sources.

11 pages, 2 figures included. Revised version, accepted for publication in ApJL

References in corpus (2)

• Klein-Nishina Effects in the Spectra of Non-Thermal Sources Immersed in External Radiation Fields
• A photon breeding mechanism for the high-energy emission of relativistic jets

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