Cherenkov telescope array extragalactic survey discovery potential and the impact of axion-like particles and secondary gamma rays

Understand

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is about to enter construction phase and one of its main key science projects is to perform an unbiased survey in search of extragalactic sources.

• We make use of both the latest blazar gamma--ray luminosity function and spectral energy distribution to derive the expected number of detectable sources for both the planned Northern and Southern arrays of the CTA observatory.
• We find that a shallow, wide survey of about 0.5 hour per field of view would lead to the highest number of blazar detections.
• Furthermore, we investigate the effect of axion-like particles and secondary gamma rays from propagating cosmic rays on the source count distribution, since these processes predict different spectral shape from standard extragalactic background light attenuation.