Related papers: TeV Blazars and Cosmic Infrared Background Radiati…
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is one of the fundamental observational quantities in cosmology. All energy releases from resolved and unresolved extragalactic sources, and the light from any truly diffuse background, excluding the…
The possible association of the blazar TXS 0506+056 with a high-energy neutrino detected by IceCube holds the tantalizing potential to answer three astrophysical questions: 1. Where do high-energy neutrinos originate? 2. Where are cosmic…
During the last 20 years, TeV astronomy turned from a fledgling field, with only a handful of sources into a fully-developed astronomy discipline, broadening our knowledge on a variety of types of TeV gamma-ray sources. This progress has…
Cosmic opacity for very high-energy gamma rays ($E>10$ TeV) due to the interaction with the extragalactic background light can be strongly reduced because of possible Lorentz-violating terms in the particle dispersion relations expected,…
Recently, a new method to constrain the distances of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes has been developed. The underlying assumption is that the Very High Energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) spectrum…
This study explores the origins of cosmic rays and their secondary messengers, focusing on the potential role of four BL Lacs W Comae, 1ES 1959+650, PKS 2005-489, and PKS 2155-304 as potential sources of astrophysical neutrinos and gamma…
Proton acceleration in nearby blazars can be diagnosed measuring their intense TeV $\gamma$-ray emission. Flux predictions for 1101+384 (Mrk421) and 1219+285 (ON231), both strong EGRET sources (0.1-10 GeV), are obtained from model spectra…
The intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF) in cosmic voids can be indirectly probed through its effect on electromagnetic cascades initiated by a source of TeV gamma-rays, such as active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN that are sufficiently…
Very high energy (~ TeV) $\gamma$-rays from blazars are attenuated by photons from the extragalactic background light (EBL). Observations of blazars can therefore provide an ideal opportunity for determining the EBL intensity if their…
The TeV emission of low power BL Lac objects has been established by the detection of an handful of them. The knowledge of the level of the TeV emission and its spectrum can shed light on the particle acceleration mechanisms, and it is…
We present a new assessment of the contribution of Blazars to the extragalactic background radiation across the e.m. spectrum. Our calculations rely on deep Blazar radio counts that we derived combining several multifrequency surveys. The…
We discuss the contribution of the blazar population to the extragalactic background radiation across the electromagnetic (e.m.) spectrum with particular reference to the microwave, hard-X-ray and gamma-ray bands. Our estimates are based on…
The development of techniques whereby gamma rays of energy 100 GeV and above can be studied from the ground, using indirect, but sensitive, techniques has opened up a new area of high energy photon astronomy. The most exciting result that…
Recent observations of TeV gamma rays from distant sources provide new limits on the cosmic infrared background and thus on radiative decays of background neutrinos. I translate these limits into bounds on transition dipole moments and…
I review the discovery of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The underlying theory and the implications for cosmology are reviewed, and I describe the prospects for future progress.
The propagation of very high energy gamma-rays ($E>100$~GeV) over cosmological distances is suppressed by pair-production processes with the ubiquitous extra-galactic soft photon background, mainly in the optical to near infra-red. The…
After a brief critical overview of the main properties of blazars and their classification, some significant results from recent multiwavelength observations are summarized, in the context of the jet physics.
TeV blazars offer an exciting prospect for discovering cosmological magnetic fields and for probing high energy processes, including CP violation, in the early universe. We propose a method for reconstructing both the non-helical and the…
A handful of new experiments aimed at measuring the as-yet-undetected polarization of the cosmic background radiation are described, with somewhat more detail given for three experiments with which the authors are are associated.
For High frequency BL Lac objects (HBLs) like H1426+428, a significant fraction of their TeV gamma-rays emitted are likely to be absorbed in interactions with the diffuse IR background, yielding $e^\pm$ pairs. The resulting $e^\pm$ pairs…