Most of the light from blazars, active galactic nuclei with jets of magnetized plasma that point nearly along the line of sight, is produced by high-energy particles, up to around 1 TeV. Although the jets are known to be ultimately powered by a supermassive black hole, how the particles are accelerated to such high energies has been an unanswered question. The process must be related to the magnetic field, which can be probed by observations of the polarization of light from the jets. Measurements of the radio to optical polarization—the only range available until now—probe extended regions of the jet containing particles that left the acceleration site days to years earlier1–3, and hence do not directly explore the acceleration mechanism, as could X-ray measurements. Here we report the detection of X-ray polarization from the blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501). We measure an X-ray linear polarization degree ΠX of around 10%, which is a factor of around 2 higher than the value at optical wavelengths, with a polarization angle parallel to the radio jet. This points to a shock front as the source of particle acceleration and also implies that the plasma becomes increasingly turbulent with distance from the shock.

Particle acceleration mechanisms in supermassive black hole jets, such as shock acceleration, magnetic reconnection, and turbulence, are expected to have observable signatures in the multiwavelength polarization properties of blazars. The recent launch of the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) enables us, for the first time, to use polarization in the X-ray band (2–8 keV) to probe the properties of the jet synchrotron emission in high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac objects (HSPs). We report the discovery of X-ray linear polarization (degree Πx = 15% ± 2% and electric vector position angle ψ x = 35° ± 4°) from the jet of the HSP Mrk 421 in an average X-ray flux state. At the same time, the degree of polarization at optical, infrared, and millimeter wavelengths was found to be lower by at least a factor of 3. During the IXPE pointing, the X-ray flux of the source increased by a factor of 2.2, while the polarization behavior was consistent with no variability. The higher level of Πx compared to longer wavelengths, and the absence of significant polarization variability, suggest a shock is the most likely X-ray emission site in the jet of Mrk 421 during the observation. The multiwavelength polarization properties are consistent with an energy-stratified electron population, where the particles emitting at longer wavelengths are located farther from the acceleration site, where they experience a more disordered magnetic field.

Effective Field Theories (EFTs) constructed as derivative expansions in powers of momentum, in the spirit of Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT), are a controllable approximation to strong dynamics as long as the energy of the interacting particles remains small, as they do not respect exact elastic unitarity. This limits their predictive power towards new physics at a higher scale if small separations from the Standard Model are found at the LHC or elsewhere. Unitarized chiral perturbation theory techniques have been devised to extend the reach of the EFT to regimes where partial waves are saturating unitarity, but their uncertainties have hitherto not been addressed thoroughly. Here we take one of the best known of them, the Inverse Amplitude Method (IAM), and carefully following its derivation, we quantify the uncertainty introduced at each step. We compare its hadron ChPT and its electroweak sector Higgs EFT applications. We find that the relative theoretical uncertainty of the IAM at the mass of the first resonance encountered in a partial-wave is of the same order in the counting as the starting uncertainty of the EFT at near-threshold energies, so that its unitarized extension should a priori be expected to be reasonably successful. This is so provided a check for zeroes of the partial wave amplitude is carried out and, if they appear near the resonance region, we show how to modify adequately the IAM to take them into account.

We report the first >99% confidence detection of X-ray polarization in BL Lacertae. During a recent X-ray/γ-ray outburst, a 287 ks observation (2022 November 27–30) was taken using the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), together with contemporaneous multiwavelength observations from the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and XMM-Newton in soft X-rays (0.3–10 keV), NuSTAR in hard X-rays (3–70 keV), and optical polarization from the Calar Alto and Perkins Telescope observatories. Our contemporaneous X-ray data suggest that the IXPE energy band is at the crossover between the low- and high-frequency blazar emission humps. The source displays significant variability during the observation, and we measure polarization in three separate time bins. Contemporaneous X-ray spectra allow us to determine the relative contribution from each emission hump. We find >99% confidence X-ray polarization Π 2 – 4 keV = 21.7 − 7.9 + 5.6 % and electric vector polarization angle ψ 2–4keV = −28.°7 ± 8.°7 in the time bin with highest estimated synchrotron flux contribution. We discuss possible implications of our observations, including previous IXPE BL Lacertae pointings, tentatively concluding that synchrotron self-Compton emission dominates over hadronic emission processes during the observed epochs.

Among active galactic nuclei, blazars show extreme variability properties. We here investigate the case of the BL Lac object S4 0954+65 with data acquired in 2019–2020 by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and by the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) Collaboration. The 2-min cadence optical light curves provided by TESS during three observing sectors of nearly one month each, allow us to study the fast variability in great detail. We identify several characteristic short-term time-scales, ranging from a few hours to a few days. However, these are not persistent, as they differ in the various TESS sectors. The long-term photometric and polarimetric optical and radio monitoring undertaken by the WEBT brings significant additional information, revealing that i) in the optical, long-term flux changes are almost achromatic, while the short-term ones are strongly chromatic; ii) the radio flux variations at 37 GHz follow those in the optical with a delay of about three weeks; iii) the range of variation of the polarization degree and angle is much larger in the optical than in the radio band, but the mean polarization angles are similar; iv) the optical long-term variability is characterized by a quasi-periodicity of about one month. We explain the source behaviour in terms of a rotating inhomogeneous helical jet, whose pitch angle can change in time.