GZK neutrinos after the Fermi-LAT diffuse photon flux measurement

By M. Ahlers, L. Anchordoqui, M. Gonzalez-Garcia, F. Halzen, S. Sarkar. 2010

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cosmogenic neutrinos originate from photo-hadronic interactions of cosmic ray protons with the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The neutrino production rate can be constrained through the accompanying electrons, positrons and gamma-rays that quickly cascade on the CMB and intergalactic magnetic fields to lower energies and generate a γ-ray background in the GeV–TeV region. Bethe–Heitler pair production by protons also contributes to the cascade and can tighten the neutrino constraints in models where extragalactic cosmic rays begin to dominate over the galactic component at a relatively low “crossover” energy. We investigate this issue in the light of the recent Fermi-LAT measurements of the diffuse extragalactic γ-ray background and illustrate by a fit to the HiRes spectrum how the prediction of the cosmogenic neutrino flux in all-proton models varies with the crossover energy. The neutrino flux is required to be smaller when the gamma-ray bound is applied, nevertheless such models are still consistent with HiRes and Fermi-LAT if one properly takes into account the energy uncertainty of cosmic ray measurements. The presently allowed flux is within reach of the IceCube neutrino telescope and other dedicated radio experiments.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe985e2f418e1e2be56c331bb36d3b69f923f5c3

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Citations in the corpus

Design and Initial Performance of the Askaryan Radio Array Prototype EeV Neutrino Detector at the South Pole (2011, background): “There are also recent cosmogenic neutrino ﬂux estimates which compute neutrino ﬂuxes subject to constraints from the Fermi diffuse gamma-ray background [36], and which include a heavier nuclear composition ( e.g. , an admixture of iron) for the UHECRs [29, 34, 35].”
Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, background): “These measurements have improved our understanding of extragalactic astrophysical objects [32, 37, 39–41] and ultra-high-energy CRs [42–44].”
IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, background): “So while this secondary flux of neutrinos is extremely well motivated, its level depends strongly on the composition of the CR [241, 242], the cosmic evolution of the sources, the spectral index of the sources, and their maximum acceleration energy [71, 72].”
Cosmogenic neutrinos: parameter space and detectabilty from PeV to ZeV (2010, background): “Interestingly, it was pointed out by recent studies (Ahlers et al., 2010; Berezinsky et al., 2010) that the strongest source evolution models can be constrained also by the cascading of cosmogenic photons down to GeV energies.”
GeV OBSERVATIONS OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES WITH THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2012, methodology): “Already, the LAT IGRB measurement has been used to constrain this component and to predict the cosmogenic ultra-high energy neutrino flux originating from charged pion decays of the ultra-high energy CR interactions (Ahlers et al. 2010; Berezinsky et al. 2011; Wang et al. 2011).”
The POEMMA (Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) observatory (2020, unknown): “The cosmogenic flux depends on the nuclear composition of UHECRs [88–97] providing another way to measure”