Speaker
Description
Extragalactic gamma-ray emitting sources, most often associated with blazars, produce very high-energy (E > 100 GeV) emission which travels extragalactic distances before detection. Along the photon path to Earth, the gamma rays have the potential to interact with various cosmological fields, such as the extragalactic background light (EBL) via photon-photon pair production, the intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF) via a straight path deviation of pairs produced in VHE-EBL photon interactions and the cosmological microwave background (CMB) through the potential for e+ and e- inverse-Compton CMB upscattering to gamma-ray energies. With these interactions, there exists a natural connection between the observed gamma-ray emission and the intervening magnetic field. Motivated by a previous study with limited statistics and inconclusive results, we investigate a possible correlation between the gamma-ray extragalactic source line of sight density and the gamma-ray flux and spectral characteristics as measured in the high-energy and VHE gamma-ray bands. With improved information on the line of sight to gamma-ray sources through the use of updated void measurements, as well as the inclusion of additional gamma-ray emitting sources, we present the characterization of the source lines of sight as compared to the source gamma-ray spectra.
