TIME DEPENDENT MODELING OF BLAZAR MULTIWAVELENGTH DATA

P.S. Coppi(1), H. Krawczynski (2), F. Aharonian (3) (1) Yale, (2) Washington University, St. Louis, (3) MPIK Heidelberg ((1) Contact: coppi@astro.yale.edu, FAX: (203) 432-5048)

If the high-energy emission from TeV blazars is produced by the Synchrotron Self-Compton (SSC) mechanism, then simultaneous X-ray and Gamma-ray observations of these objects are a powerful probe of the electron (and positron) populations responsible for this emission. Understanding the emitting particle distributions and their evolution in turn allow us to probe physical conditions in the inner blazar jet and test, for example, various acceleration scenarios. By constraining the SSC emission model parameters, such observations enable us to predict the intrinsic (unabsorbed) Gamma-ray spectra of these sources, a major uncertainty in current attempts to use the observed Gamma-ray spectra to constrain the intensity of the extragalactic background at optical/infrared wavelengths. We have used a time dependent SSC code to model in detail data from the three strong TeV blazars: Mrk 501, Mrk 421, and 1ES 1426+428. In this contribution we describe the present status of our time dependent modeling, and summarize the conclusions for the intensity of the Diffuse Extragalactic Background Radiation in the wavelength range from 0.5 to 100 microns.