Sarah Wagner - How to sparkle in gamma rays: on particle acceleration and gravitational lensing of blazar jets
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Europe/Berlin
Description
The production site and process responsible for the highly variable high-energy emission from blazar jets are still debated. In this talk, I show how acceleration of non-thermal particles can be described by solving stochastic differential equations. The aim of this approach is to build up on the plasma properties found in magnetohydrodynamic jet simulations and eventually produce synthetic light curves. These can be compared to, for example, 17 years of Fermi-LAT data of blazar variability.
In a second part of the talk, I focus on the gravitationally-lensed blazar PKS 1830-211, for which radio observations have revealed two images. Gravitational lenses can be used as microscopes to investigate the nature of such sources. To study the gravitationally-induced time delay in the PKS 1830-211 Fermi-LAT light curve, I present a metric optimization method and an improved auto-correlation approach. Both methods yield a time-consistent delay of approximately 22 days. The detection of a consistent lag throughout the whole light curve suggests that the gamma-rays originate from a persistent location in the jet.
Together, these results bring us closer to understanding the engines that make blazar jets sparkle across the universe.
