Mrk 421: The Multi-TeV emission and its astrophysical origin

The TeV blazar Markarian 421 underwent multi-TeV flaring during April 2004 and simultaneously observations in the X-ray and TeV energies were made. It was observed that the TeV outbursts had no counterparts in the lower energy range. One implication of this is that it might be an orphan flare. We show that Fermi-accelerated protons of energy < 168 TeV can interact with the low energy tail of the background synchrotron self-Compton photons in the inner region of the blazar to produce the multi-TeV flare and our results fit very well with the observed spectrum.