Prospects for future very high-energy gamma-ray sky survey: impact of secondary gamma rays

Understand

Very high-energy gamma-ray measurements of distant blazars can be well explained by secondary gamma rays emitted by cascades induced by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

• The secondary gamma rays will enable one to detect a large number of blazars with future ground based gamma-ray telescopes such as Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).
• We show that the secondary emission process will allow CTA to detect 100, 130, 150, 87, and 8 blazars above 30 GeV, 100 GeV, 300 GeV, 1 TeV, and 10 TeV, respectively, up to $z\sim8$ assuming the intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF) strength $B=10^{-17}$ G and an unbiased all sky survey with 0.5 hr exposure at each Field of View, where total observing time is $\sim540$ hr.
• These numbers will be 79, 96, 110, 63, and 6 up to $z\sim5$ in the case of $B=10^{-15}$ G.