Effects of Non-Continuous Inverse Compton Cooling in Blazars

Flaring states of blazars are ideally suited to study the extreme physics of relativistic outflows.A thorough understanding of particle acceleration and cooling mechanisms operating in blazar jets can be achieved via physical modeling of varying multi-band flaring emission from the radio up to the -ray range.The majority of the numerical codes developed for this task use a simplified continuous-loss description for the inverse Compton particle cooling.Such an approximation is however no longer valid in the Klein-Nishina (KN) regime, as particles suffer large relative jumps in energy.In our study, we explore the importance of non-continuous (discrete) Compton cooling losses and their effect on the blazar electron spectrum and broad-band spectral energy distribution (SED) for typical physical conditions during blazar -ray flares.We solve numerically the full transport equation that takes into account large relative jumps in energy, and simulate the timedependent electron spectrum and SED for the conditions of extreme flares of the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar (FSRQ) 3C 279.We find that non-continuous cooling can significantly modify the shape of the electron spectrum, resulting in notable differences up to ∼35 -40% in the corresponding SED during extreme flaring states.