The Detection of Fermi AGN above 100 GeV using Clustering Analysis

The density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN has been applied to the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) dataset of $E_{\gamma }⩾100$ GeV events with $\mid b\mid >{10}^{\circ }$, in order to search for new very high energy (VHE) $\gamma$-ray sources. The clustering analysis returned 49 clusters, of which 21 correspond to already known VHE-emitting active galactic nuclei (AGN) within the TeVCat catalogue and a further 11 were found to be significant in a full Fermi analysis. Of these, 2 are previously detected Fermi VHE AGN, and 9 represent new VHE sources consisting of 6 BL Lac objects, one blazar of unknown type and 2 unassociated sources. Comparing these, along with the VHE AGN RBS 0679 and RBS 0970 previously detected with Fermi-LAT, to the current populations of AGN detected with ground-based instruments and Fermi suggests that the VHE-emitting AGN discovered in this study are very similar to the TeVCat AGN and therefore further observations with ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes are recommended.