Related papers: Low power BL Lacertae objects and the blazar seque…
Since 1997, BL Lacertae has undergone a phase of high optical activity, with the occurrence of several prominent outbursts. Starting from 1999, the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) consortium has organized various multifrequency…
Internal shocks propagating through an ambient radiation field, are subject to a radiative drag that, under certain conditions, can significantly affect their dynamics and, consequently, the evolution of the beaming cone of emission…
We explore a new mechanism for photon energy gain in a relativistic plasma with velocity shear. This process takes place in optically thick plasma and resembles conventional Fermi acceleration, where photons undergo multiple scatterings…
The broadband SEDs of blazars exhibit two broad spectral components, which in leptonic emission models are attributed to synchrotron radiation and synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) radiation of relativistic electrons. During high state phases,…
Observations of minute-scale flares in TeV Blazars place constraints on particle acceleration mechanisms in those objects. The implications for a variety of radiation mechanisms have been addressed in the literature; in this paper we…
Chandra's high resolution observations of radio galaxies require a revisit of the relevant electron acceleration processes. Although the diffusive shock particle acceleration model may explain spectra of spatially unresolved sources, it…
We consider the acceleration of charged particles in relativistic shearing flows, with Lorentz factor up to $\Gamma_0 \sim 20$. We present numerical solutions to the particle transport equation and compare these with results from analytical…
We present the results of the \textit{Fermi}-LAT 10-years-long light curves (LCs) modeling of selected blazars: six flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and five BL Lacertae (BL Lacs), examined in 7-, 10-, and 14-day binning. The LCs and…
Blazars radiate from relativistic jets launched by a supermassive black hole along our line of sight; the subclass of FSRQs exhibits broad emission lines, a telltale sign of a gas-rich environment and high accretion rate, contrary to the…
The past 20 years have seen phenomenal progress in our understanding of BL Lac objects. They form part of the blazar class, which are radio-loud AGN whose relativistic jets are aligned along our line of sight. Several critical milestones…
We review the acceleration of energetic particles in relativistic astrophysical jets characterized by a significant velocity shear. The possible formation of power-law momentum spectra is discussed and typical acceleration timescales are…
We review the main results from several radio, X-ray and multi-frequency surveys on the topic of cosmological evolution of BL Lacertae objects. Updated findings on BL Lac evolution following the recent identification of many sources in the…
We discuss the production of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) nuclei and neutrinos from blazars. We compute the nuclear cascade in the jet for both BL Lac objects and flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), and in the ambient radiation…
We determine the spectrum of particles accelerated at shocks with arbitrary speed and arbitrary scattering properties for different choices of the equation of state of the downstream plasma. More specifically we consider the effect of…
Shocks are promising sites of particle acceleration in extragalactic jets. In electron-ion shocks, electrons can be heated up to large Lorentz factors, making them an attractive scenario to explain the high minimum electron Lorentz factors…
For a relativistic particle moving in the presence of mean scalar and vector fields, the energy at second order in the scalar field is shown to contain two contributions in general. One is a momentum-dependent repulsive interaction…
We find that energy losses due to synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission in blazar jets can produce distinctive signatures in the time-averaged synchrotron and SSC spectra of these objects. For a fairly broad range of particle injection…
We developed a multi-region radiation model for the evolution of flux and spectral index with time. In this model, each perturbation component in the jet produces an independent flare. The model can be used to study the decomposition of…
Since 2002, the number of detected blazars at E_\gamma > 100 GeV has more than doubled. I study all currently known BL Lac-type objects with published energy spectra. Their intrinsic energy spectra are reconstructed by removing…
In this review, recent progress in theoretical models for blazar emission will be summarized. The salient features of both leptonic and lepto-hadronic approaches to modeling blazar spectral energy distributions will be reviewed. I will…