Jet Emission in Young Radio Sources: A Fermi Large Area Telescope Gamma-Ray View

We investigate the contribution of the beamed jet component to the high-energy emission in young and compact extragalactic radio sources, focusing for the first time on the γ-ray band. We derive predictions on the γ-ray luminosities associated with the relativistic jet assuming a leptonic radiative model. The high-energy emission is produced via Compton scattering by the relativistic electrons in a spherical region at the considered scales (lsim10 kpc). Simulations show a wide range of γ-ray luminosities, with intensities up to ~1046-1048 erg s-1 depending on the assumed jet parameters. We find a highly linear relation between the simulated X-ray and γ-ray luminosities that can be used to select candidates for γ-ray detection. We compare the simulated luminosity distributions in the radio, X-ray, and γ-ray regimes with observations for the largest sample of X-ray-detected young radio quasars. Our analysis of ~4-yr Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data does not yield any statistically significant detections. However, the majority of the model-predicted γ-ray fluxes for the sample are near or below the current Fermi-LAT flux threshold and compatible with the derived upper limits. Our study gives constraints on the minimum jet power (L jet, kin/L disk > 0.01) of a potential jet contribution to the X-ray emission in the most compact sources (lsim 1 kpc) and on the particle-to-magnetic field energy density ratio that are in broad agreement with equipartition assumptions.