The possibility of investigating ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray sources using data on the extragalactic diffuse gamma-ray emission

Resumo

We provide our estimates of the intensity of the gamma-ray emission with an energy near 0.1 TeV generated in intergalactic space in the interactions of cosmic rays with background emissions. We assume that the cosmic-ray sources are pointlike and that these are active galactic nuclei. The following possible types of sources are considered: remote and powerful ones, at redshifts up to z = 1.1, with a monoenergetic particle spectrum, E = 10²¹ eV; the same objects, but with a power-law particle spectrum; and nearby sources at redshifts 0 < z ≤ 0.0092, i.e., at distances no larger than 50 Mpc also with a power-law particle spectrum. The contribution of cosmic rays to the extragalactic diffuse gammaray background at an energy of 0.1 TeVhas been found to depend on the type of sources or, more specifically, the contribution ranges from f ≪ 10⁻⁴ to f ≈ 0.1, depending on the source model. We conclude that the data on the extragalactic background gamma-ray emission can be used to determine the characteristics of extragalactic cosmic-ray sources, i.e., their distances and the pattern of the particle energy spectrum.