Mainz 2014 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 1: Hauptvorträge 1

T 1.2: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 24. März 2014, 09:50–10:30, RW 1

The Physics of Propagating TeV Gamma-rays: from Plasma Instabilities to Cosmological Structure Formation — •Christoph Pfrommer — Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, D-69118 Heidelberg, Germany

The extragalactic gamma-ray sky at TeV energies is dominated by blazars, a subclass of accreting super-massive black holes with powerful relativistic outflows directed at us. Only constituting a small fraction of the total power output of black holes, blazars were thought to have a minor impact on the universe at best. As I will argue here, the opposite is true and the gamma-ray emission from TeV blazars can be thermalized via beam-plasma instabilities on cosmological scales with order unity efficiency, resulting in a potentially dramatic heating of the low-density intergalactic medium. I will review this novel heating mechanism and explore the consequences for the formation of structure in the universe. In particular, I show how it produces an inverted temperature-density relation of the intergalactic medium that is in agreement with observations of the Lyman-alpha forest. This suggests that blazar heating can potentially explain the paucity of dwarf galaxies in galactic halos and voids. This also transforms our understanding of the evolution of blazars, their contribution to the extra-galactic gamma-ray background, and how their individual spectra can be used in constraining intergalactic magnetic fields.