Searching for Very High Energy Flaring States of Blazars in Fermi LAT Data Using Bayesian Blocks

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Observations of the high-peaked BL Lac objects (HBLs) PKS 2155-304 (by H.E.S.S.) and Mrk 501 (by MAGIC) have shown that very rapid flaring activity is produced by these objects at energies >0.2 TeV. Even though this emission appears to be connected with epochs of increased X-ray activity, the very short time scales of the flares ( 5 min) present serious problems for standard synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission models. Because observations by ACTs such as H.E.S.S, MAGIC, and VERITAS require dedicated pointed observations, the ubiquity and recurrence rate of these short time scale flares among blazars generally is not known. In the Fermi LAT band, extrapolating reasonable spectral shapes from TeV energies, these flares would appear as a handful of photons with energies >10 GeV and with arrival times clustered on time scales similar to those seen for highest state epochs of PKS 2155-304 and Mrk 501. The rate of these photons should greatly exceed that of the local diffuse emission, even in regions near the Galactic plane. We present a method for detecting these flares using photon-by-photon exposure-weighting and Bayesian Blocks to reconstruct the light curves on the shortest possible time scales. We verify the method through simulations and present results for HBLs and other blazars using the first year Fermi data. We also discuss a possible trigger mechanism to be implemented in the Fermi-LAT data processing pipeline that may be used to alert ACTs and other observatories of these flaring episodes.

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