Related papers: Photoabsorption of Gamma Rays in Relativistic Jets
Gamma-ray absorption due to gamma-gamma-pair creation on cosmological scales depends on the line-of-sight integral of the evolving density of low-energy photons in the Universe, i.e. on the history of the diffuse, isotropic radiation field.…
Relativistic jets from accreting supermassive black holes at cosmological distances can be powerful emitters of $\gamma$-rays. However, the precise mechanisms and locations responsible for the dissipation of energy within these jets,…
This paper presents an analysis of the dependence of the opacity for high-energy gamma-rays to gamma-gamma absorption by low-energy photons, on the polarization of the gamma-ray and target photons. This process has so far only been…
We develop a general expression for the gamma-gamma absorption coefficient for gamma-rays propagating in an arbitrary direction at an arbitrary point in space above an X-ray emitting accretion disk. The X-ray intensity is assumed to vary as…
Significant absorption of radiation is usually accompanied by refraction. This is not the case for $\gamma$ rays travelling cosmic distances. We show that the real and imaginary parts of the refraction index are indeed commensurable, as…
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…
A small fraction of X-ray photons from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), after escaping the relativistic jet, are scattered by electrons in the circumburst medium. Subsequent photon-photon absorption between the incoming MeV $\gamma$-rays and the…
The propagation of $\gamma$ rays over very large distances provides new insights on the intergalactic medium and on fundamental physics. On their path to the Earth, $\gamma$ rays can annihilate with diffuse infrared or optical photons of…
We review the physics of GRB production by relativistic jets that start highly opaque near the central source and then expand to transparency. We discuss dissipative and radiative processes in the jet and how radiative transfer shapes the…
The absorption of TeV $\gamma$-ray photons produced in relativistic jets by surrounding soft photon fields is a long-standing problem of jet physics. In some cases the most likely emission site close to the central black hole is ruled out…
Surprisingly, the contribution to the cosmic opacity to UHE ($E>10^{18} \, \rm eV$) $\gamma$-rays has been systematically computed so far for the $\gamma \gamma \to e^+e^-$ and $\gamma \gamma \to e^+ e^- e^+ e^-$ processes alone. We go a…
Galactic Gamma ray astronomy at very high energy (E > 30 TeV) is a vital tool in the study of the non-thermal universe. The interpretation of the observations in this energy region requires the precise modeling of the attenuation of photons…
We discuss some phenomenological aspects of $\gamma$-ray emitting jets. In particular, we present calculations of the $\gamma$-sphere and $\pi$-sphere for various target photon fields, and employ them to demonstrate how $\gamma$-ray…
Relativistic outflows in the form of jets are common in many astrophysical objects. By their very nature, jets have angle dependent velocity profiles, Gamma = Gamma(r, theta, phi), where Gamma is the outflow Lorentz factor. In this work we…
We investigate potential $\gamma-\gamma$ absorption of gamma-ray emission from blazars arising from inhomogeneities along the line of sight, beyond the diffuse Extragalactic Background Light (EBL). As plausible sources of excess…
Absorption imaging is a commonly adopted method to acquire, with high temporal resolution, spatial information on a partially transparent object. It relies on the interference between a probe beam and the coherent response of the object. In…
In this paper, we study the photon-photon pair production optical depth for gamma-rays with energies from 10 to 200 GeV emitted by powerful blazars due to the diffuse radiation field of broad line region (BLR). There are four key parameters…
We introduce an absorption imaging technique for ultracold gases that suppresses interference fringes and coherence-induced artifacts by reducing the transverse spatial coherence of the imaging light. The method preserves the narrow…
The pair-production absorption of high-energy gamma-rays by intergalactic low-energy photons is expected to produce a high-energy cutoff in the spectra of extragalactic sources which is a sensitive function of redshift. We first discuss the…
We present a new calculation of the intergalactic gamma-ray absorption coefficient as a function of both energy and redshift. In reexamining this problem, we make use of a new, empirically based calculation (as opposed to previous model…