Broadband multi-wavelength study of LHAASO detected AGN

TL;DR

This study combines multi-wavelength data to analyze the spectral energy distributions of five AGNs detected by LHAASO, evaluating various jet emission models to understand their high-energy emission mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides the first multi-wavelength SEDs for LHAASO-detected AGNs and compares multiple jet emission models to explain their spectra.

Findings

The one-zone leptonic model fits most SEDs but not high-energy tails.

Including $pp$ interactions improves spectral fits.

The spine-layer model offers good fits as a multi-zone scenario.

Abstract

Recently, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) collaboration presented the first catalog of $\gamma$-ray sources using 508 days of LHAASO data, from March 2021 to September 2022. This catalog contains four blazars and a possible liner-type AGN counterpart. In this work, we establish averaged multi-wavelength SEDs by combining data from the \textsl{Fermi}-Large Area Telescope, \textsl{Swift}, ZTF, and WISE covering the same period as the LHAASO detection. In general, these five AGNs are found in low states at all wavelengths. To study the multi-wavelength properties of these AGNs, several jet emission models, including the one-zone leptonic model, the one-zone leptonic and hadronuclear ($pp$) model, the one-zone proton-synchrotron model, and the spine-layer model are applied to reproduce their averaged SEDs, respectively. We find that the one-zone leptonic model can reproduce most of the SEDs, except for the high-energy tail of the LHAASO spectra of Mrk 421 and Mrk 501. To improve the fitting, emission from $pp$ interactions is favoured in the framework of a one-zone model. The spine-layer model, which can be treated as a multi-zone scenario, can also provide good spectral fits. The influence of different extragalactic background light models on fitting LHAASO energy spectrum is also discussed.