Studies of extragalactic background light with TeV BL Lacertae objects

ABSTRACT Very high energy (VHE; E ≥ 100 GeV) gamma-rays from cosmological distances are attenuated by the extragalactic background light (EBL) in the infrared to ultraviolet bands. By contrasting measured versus intrinsic emission,we can derive the EBL photon density. However, we do not know the intrinsic spectra and the EBL separately, only their combined effect. Here we first present a flexible model-dependent optical depth method to study the EBL by fitting the emission spectra of TeV BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) via a one-zone leptonic synchrotron self-Compton model (SSC). We have little information about electron energy distributions (EEDs) in the jet, which is critically important to build spectral energy distributions (SEDs) in the SSC scenario. Based on current particle acceleration models, we use two types of EEDs to fit the observed spectra: a power-law log-parabola (PLLP) EED and a broken power-law (BPL) EED. We find that the upper limit of the EBL density is about 30 n W m−2 sr−1, which is similar to the published measurement. Furthermore, we propose an unprecedented method to test the radiation mechanisms involved in TeV objects, by simply comparing the reduced EBL density with the limit obtained by galaxy counts. We demonstrate that for some BL Lacs, at least, the one-zone SSC model should be reconsidered.