Synchrotron and inverse-Compton emission from blazar jets - III. Compton-dominant blazars

TL;DR

This study models the multi-wavelength spectra of six Compton-dominant blazars using an extended jet model, revealing the importance of jet geometry, equipartition, and high Lorentz factors in explaining their emission characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed jet model with a parabolic to conical transition, explaining the radio synchrotron break and inverse-Compton emission in blazars, and proposes a new interpretation of the blazar sequence.

Findings

Jet transition to equipartition occurs at large distances (~10^5 Schwarzschild radii).

A parabolic-to-conical jet model fits the multiwavelength data well.

High bulk Lorentz factors and jet power are necessary to reproduce observed Compton dominance.

Abstract

In this paper we develop the extended jet model of Potter & Cotter to model the simultaneous multi-wavelength spectra of six Compton-dominant blazars. We include an accelerating parabolic base transitioning to a slowly decelerating conical jet with a geometry set by observations of M87 and consistent with simulations and theory. We investigate several jet models and find that the optically thick to thin synchrotron break in the radio spectrum requires the jet to first come into equipartition at large distances along the jet (10^5 Schwarzschild radii), consistent with the observed transition from parabolic to conical in the jet of M87. We confirm this result analytically and calculate the expected frequency core-shift relations for the models under consideration. We find that a parabolic jet transitioning to a ballistic conical jet, which starts in equipartition and becomes more particle dominated at larger distances, fits the multiwavelength data of the six blazars well, whilst an adiabatic equipartition conical section requires very large bulk Lorentz factors to reproduce the Compton-dominance of the blazars. We find that all these blazars require high power, high bulk Lorentz factor jets observed close to the line of sight as we expect from the blazar sequence and consistent with the results from Paper II. The inverse-Compton emission in our fits is due to inverse-Compton scattering of high-redshift CMB photons at large distances along the jet due to the high bulk Lorentz factors of the jets. We postulate a new interpretation of the blazar sequence based on the radius of the transition region of the jet (where the jet is brightest in synchrotron emission) scaling linearly with black hole mass.