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Abstract

Relativistic electrons are an essential component in many astrophysical sources, and their radiation may dominate the high-energy bands. Inverse Compton (IC) emission is the radiation mechanism that plays the most important role in these bands. The basic properties of IC, such as the total and differential cross sections, have long been studied; the properties of the IC emission depend strongly not only on the emitting electron distribution but also on the properties of the target photons. This complicates the phenomenological studies of sources, where target photons are supplied from a broad radiation component. We study the spectral properties of IC emission generated by a power-law distribution of electrons on a power-law distribution of target photons. We approximate the resulting spectrum by a broken-power-law distribution and show that there can be up to three physically motivated spectral breaks. If the target photon spectrum extends to sufficiently low energies, ε_min < m_e²c⁴/E_max (m_e and c are electron mass and speed of light, respectively; ε_min and E_max are the minimum/maximum energies of target photons and electrons, respectively), then the high-energy part of the IC component has a spectral slope typical for the Thomson regime with an abrupt cutoff close to E_max. The spectra typical for the Klein–Nishina regime are formed above m_e²c⁴ / ε_min. If the spectrum of target photons features a cooling break, i.e., a change of the photon index by 0.5 at ε_br, then the transition to the Klein–Nishina regime proceeds through an intermediate change of the photon index by 0.5 at m_e²c⁴ / ε_br.