Photohadronic modelling of the 2010 gamma-ray flare from Mrk 421

Rosales de León, Alberto; Brown, Anthony M; Chadwick, Paula M

doi:10.1093/mnras/staa3839

Photohadronic modelling of the 2010 gamma-ray flare from Mrk 421

Rosales de León, Alberto; Brown, Anthony M; Chadwick, Paula M

Authors

Alberto Rosales de León

Dr Anthony Brown anthony.brown@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor

Professor Paula Chadwick p.m.chadwick@durham.ac.uk
Head Of Department

Abstract

Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that have a relativistic jet with a small viewing angle towards the observer. Recent results based on hadronic scenarios have motivated an ongoing discussion of how a blazar can produce high energy neutrinos during a flaring state and which scenario can successfully describe the observed gamma-ray behaviour. Markarian 421 is one of the closest and brightest objects in the extragalactic gamma-ray sky and showed flaring activity over a 14-days period in 2010 March. In this work, we describe the performed analysis of Fermi-LAT data from the source focused on the MeV range (100 MeV–1 GeV), and study the possibility of a contribution coming from the pγ interactions between protons and MeV SSC target photons to fit the very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission. The fit results were compared with two leptonic models (one-zone and two-zone) using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) test, which evaluates goodness-of-fit alongside the simplicity of the model. In all cases, the photohadronic model was favoured as a better fit description in comparison to the one-zone leptonic model, and with respect to the two-zone model in the majority of cases. Our results show the potential of a photohadronic contribution to a lepto-hadronic origin of gamma-ray flux of blazars. Future gamma-ray observations above tens of TeV and below 100 MeV in energy will be crucial to test and discriminate between models.

Citation

Rosales de León, A., Brown, A. M., & Chadwick, P. M. (2021). Photohadronic modelling of the 2010 gamma-ray flare from Mrk 421. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 501(2), 2198-2208. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa3839

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 9, 2020
Online Publication Date	Dec 12, 2020
Publication Date	2021-02
Deposit Date	Jan 4, 2021
Publicly Available Date	Jan 4, 2021
Journal	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN	0035-8711
Electronic ISSN	1365-2966
Publisher	Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	501
Issue	2
Pages	2198-2208
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa3839
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1254414

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©:2020 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.