Do beam-plasma instabilities drain blazar pair beams before they radiate?
In plain words
The electron-positron beams made by gamma rays in empty space might lose their energy to the thin intergalactic plasma before emitting gamma rays. If so, the missing gamma rays would not require magnetic fields at all.
Precise statement
For TeV-blazar pair beams with Lorentz factors $\sim 10^{6}$ traversing void plasma with $n_e \sim 10^{-7}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$ and $T \sim 10^{4}\,\mathrm{K}$, determine whether the nonlinear saturated growth of the electrostatic oblique instability drains beam energy faster than inverse-Compton cooling on the CMB. Answer yes or no from kinetic simulations or analytic theory that includes nonlinear Landau damping and plasma inhomogeneity.
What would settle it
Particle-in-cell simulations at realistic beam-to-plasma density ratios, extrapolated with a validated nonlinear theory.
Status in the literature
Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.
2025 to 2026 cascade simulations including instability cooling find that the inferred field bounds depend on the assumed saturation parameters.
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