Very high-energy gamma-ray signature of ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray acceleration in Centaurus A

Abstract

The association of at least a dozen ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray (UHECR) events with energy $\gtrsim 55$ EeV detected by the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) from the direction of Centaurus-A, the nearest radio galaxy, supports the scenario of UHECR acceleration in the jets of radio galaxies. In this work, we model radio to very high energy (VHE,$\gtrsim 100$ \rm GeV) $\gamma$-ray emission from Cen A, including GeV hardness detected by Fermi-LAT and TeV emission detected by HESS. We consider two scenarios: (i) Two zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) and external-Compton (EC) models, (ii) Two zone SSC, EC and photo-hadronic emission from cosmic ray interactions. The GeV hardness observed by Fermi-LAT can be explained using these two scenarios, where zone 2 EC emission is very important. Hadronic emission in scenario (ii) can explain VHE data with the same spectral slope as obtained through fitting UHECRs from Cen A. The peak luminosity in cosmic ray proton at 1 TeV, to explain the VHE $\gamma$-ray data is $\approx 2.5 \times 10^{46}$ erg/s. The bolometric luminosity in cosmic ray protons is consistent with the luminosity required to explain the origin of 13 UHECR signal events that are correlated with Cen A.