Implications of Plasma Beam Instabilities for the Statistics of the Fermi Hard Gamma-ray Blazars and the Origin of the Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Background

TL;DR

This paper explores how plasma beam instabilities can suppress inverse Compton cascades, allowing TeV-bright blazars to evolve similarly to quasars and still match Fermi observations of gamma-ray backgrounds.

Contribution

It demonstrates that plasma beam instabilities can prevent cascade reprocessing, supporting models where blazar evolution aligns with quasar-like behavior without conflicting with Fermi data.

Findings

Plasma beam instabilities can suppress inverse Compton cascades.

A simple model reproduces Fermi blazar observations without free parameters.

TeV-bright blazar evolution can be consistent with quasar-like redshift evolution.

Abstract

Fermi has been instrumental in constraining the luminosity function and redshift evolution of gamma-ray bright blazars. This includes limits upon the spectrum and anisotropy of the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGRB), redshift distribution of nearby Fermi active galactic nuclei (AGN), and the construction of a log(N)-log(S) relation. Based upon these, it has been argued that the evolution of the gamma-ray bright blazar population must be much less dramatic than that of other AGN. However, critical to such claims is the assumption that inverse Compton cascades reprocess emission above a TeV into the Fermi energy range, substantially enhancing the strength of the observed limits. Here we demonstrate that in the absence of such a process, due, e.g., to the presence of virulent plasma beam instabilities that preempt the cascade, a population of TeV-bright blazars that evolve similarly to quasars is consistent with the population of hard gamma-ray blazars observed by Fermi. Specifically, we show that a simple model for the properties and luminosity function is simultaneously able to reproduce their log(N)-log(S) relation, local redshift distribution, and contribution to the EGRB and its anisotropy without any free parameters. Insofar the naturalness of a picture in which the hard gamma-ray blazar population exhibits the strong redshift evolution observed in other tracers of the cosmological history of accretion onto halos is desirable, this lends support for the absence of the inverse Compton cascades and the existence of the beam plasma instabilities.