The gamma ray background from large scale structure formation

Hierarchical clustering of dark matter halos is thought to describe well the large scale structure of the universe. The baryonic component of the halos is shock heated to the virial temperature while a small fraction of the energy flux through the shocks may be energized through the first order Fermi process to relativistic energy per particle. It has been proposed that the electrons accelerated in this way may upscatter the photons of the universal microwave background to gamma ray energies and indeed generate a diffuse background of gamma rays that compares well to the observations. In this paper, we calculate the spectra of the particles accelerated at the merger shocks and re-evaluate the contribution of structure formation to the extragalactic diffuse gamma ray background (EDGRB), concluding that this contribution adds up to at most 10% of the observed EDGRB. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.