Intergalactic magnetic fields and plasma effects of relativistic pair beams from photon-photon-absorption of the TeV emission of cosmological blazars

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser
• Subject Area: Astrophysics and Astronomy ; Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268773749

The TeV detections of more than 30 blazars at cosmological distances by air-Cherenkov telecopes have led to the emergence of the new plasma-blazar-cosmology discipline with active and important contributions from our group. Any blazar more distant than redshift $z=0.16$ produces energetic $e^{\pm }$ particle beams in double photon collisions with the extragalactic background light, which are subject to rapid two-stream-like instabilities of both electrostatic and electromagnetic nature in the unmagnetized intergalactic medium. The dissipation of the free pair beam energy in the intergalactic medium has important consequences for the thermal history of the intergalactic medium and the formation of cosmic structures after the reionization epoch. The proposal adresses important plasma physical and particle physical processes, including the more detailed relativistic kinematics of pair production by double photon collision, the kinetic instability analysis of oblique electrostatic and electromagnetic fluctuations from pair beams, jitter radiation radio halos of relaxed relativistic pairs in fluctuating aperiodic magnetic fields, and the investigation of plasma effects on ultrahighenergy hadron beams in the unmagnetized intergalactic medium.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants