Electromagnetic cascades in magnetized media

Abstract

The investigation of the astrophysical nature of gamma-ray sources and the processes responsible for their broad-band emission requires a detailed modeling of their observable spectrum, in which electromagnetic cascades can play an important role. An open issue in this modeling is the effect of magnetic fields in the development of cascades. In this paper we present a novel numerical scheme to compute this effect in a self-consistent way. Applied to a toy model, our scheme reproduces the features expected for cascades in the strong and weak magnetic field regimes.