Testing the hadronuclear origin of PeV neutrinos observed with IceCube

By Kohta Murase, M. Ahlers, B. Lacki. 2013

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider implications of the IceCube signal for hadronuclear (pp) scenarios of neutrino sources such as galaxy clusters/groups and star-forming galaxies. Since the observed neutrino flux is comparable to the diffuse γ-ray background flux obtained by Fermi, we place new, strong upper limits on the source spectral index, Γ≲2.1–2.2. In addition, the new IceCube data imply that these sources contribute at least 30%–40% of the diffuse γ-ray background in the 100 GeV range and even ∼100% for softer spectra. Our results, which are insensitive to details of the pp source models, are one of the first strong examples of the multimessenger approach combining the measured neutrino and γ-ray fluxes. The pp origin of the IceCube signal can further be tested by constraining Γ with sub-PeV neutrino observations, by unveiling the sub-TeV diffuse γ-ray background and by observing such pp sources with TeV γ-ray detectors. We also discuss specific pp source models with a multi-PeV neutrino break/cutoff, which are consistent with the current IceCube data.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df6e045a0187224ab866b892e52e12303d565e21

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Petropoulou
2. Kohta Murase
3. A. Fedynitch
4. Todor Stanev
5. D. Fox
6. S. Ando
7. I. Tamborra
8. W. Rhode

Citations in the corpus

• Star-forming galaxies as the origin of diffuse high-energy backgrounds: gamma-ray and neutrino connections, and implications for starburst history (2014, background): “[15] discussed the possibility that peculiar supernovae are responsible for ∼ 10–100 PeV cosmic rays.”
• A Multimessenger Picture of the Flaring Blazar TXS 0506+056: Implications for High-energy Neutrino Emission and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, background): “In this context, multimessenger studies have provided important clues to the origins of the diffuse neutrino, γ-ray, and cosmic-ray backgrounds (Murase et al. 2013; Fang & Murase 2018), and offer a powerful approach for identifying transient or highly variable neutrino sources, including blazar…”
• A COMBINED MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD ANALYSIS OF THE HIGH-ENERGY ASTROPHYSICAL NEUTRINO FLUX MEASURED WITH ICECUBE (2015, background): “Murase et al. (2013) pointed out that a soft spectrum (γ & 2.1−2.2) of the astrophysical neutrino flux might be difficult to accommodate with the observed extragalactic gamma-ray background (Ackermann et al. 2015), if the entire neutrino flux is produced in pp-interactions in extragalactic sources…”
• IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, methodology): “We highlight two upper limits on the neutrino flux (dashed lines) predicted by multi-messenger models [52, 60].”