2017/02/28 by Paul Tiede, Avery E. Broderick, Mohamad Shalaby +4 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Blazar #Cosmic infrared background #Cosmic microwave background #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Galactic halo #Halo #Intergalactic travel #Magnetic field #Neutrino Physics Research #Sky #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab737e
12 pages, 14 figures, 1 appendix. Accepted to ApJ
openalex created_date 2017/03/23 · arxiv created 2020/02/13 · openalex publication_date 2020/04/01 · arxiv updated 2020/10/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract Pair creation on the cosmic infrared background and subsequent inverse-Compton scattering on the cosmic microwave background potentially reprocesses the TeV emission of blazars into faint GeV halos with structures sensitive to intergalactic magnetic fields (IGMF). Previous work has shown that these halos are then highly anisotropic and extended. If the coherence length of the IGMF is greater than the inverse-Compton cooling length of the pairs, then the orientation of the gamma-ray halo will be correlated with the direction of the magnetic field which is unknown and expected to change for each source. In order to constructively add each source we then use angular power spectra which are insensitive to the jet orientation. By looking at known GeV blazars detected by Fermi , we exclude the existence of an IGMF with coherence lengths >100 Mpc at greater than 3.9 σ with current-day strengths in the range 10 −16 to 10 −15 G, and at 2 σ from 10 −17 to 10 −14 G. This provides a direct measurement of the nonexistence of gamma-ray halos, providing an important check on previous results.