UHE neutrinos from superconducting cosmic strings

Abstract

Superconducting cosmic strings naturally emit highly boosted charge carriers from cusps. This occurs when a cosmic string or a loop moves through a magnetic field and develops an electric current. The charge carriers and the products of their decay, including protons, photons and neutrinos, are emitted as a narrow jets with opening angle $\theta \sim 1/{\gamma }_c$, where ${\gamma }_c$ is the Lorentz factor of the cusp. The excitation of electric currents in strings occurs mostly in clusters of galaxies, which are characterized by magnetic fields $B\sim 10^{-6}$ G and a filling factor $f_B\sim 10^{-3}$. Two string parameters determine the emission of the particles: the symmetry breaking scale $\eta$, which for successful applications should be of order $10^9$--$10^{12}$ GeV, and the dimensionless parameter $i_c$, which determines the maximum induced current as $J_{max}=i_{c}e\eta$ and the energy of emitted charge carriers as ${\epsilon }_x\sim i_c{\gamma }_c\eta$, where $e$ is the electric charge of a particle. For the parameters $\eta$ and $B$ mentioned above, the Lorentz factor reaches ${\gamma }_c\sim 10^{12}$ and the maximum particle energy can be as high as ${\gamma }_c\eta \sim 10^{22}$ GeV. The diffuse fluxes of UHE neutrinos are close to the cascade upper limit, and can be detected by future neutrino observatories. The signatures of this model are: very high energies of neutrinos, in excess of $10^{20}$ eV, correlation of neutrinos with clusters of galaxies, simultaneous appearance of several neutrino-produced showers in the field of view of very large detectors, such as JEM-EUSO, and 10 TeV gamma radiation from the Virgo cluster. The flux of UHE protons from cusps may account for a large fraction of the observed events at the highest energies.

24 pages, 2 figures, v2: Minor changes, matches the PRD version

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Cited by in corpus (22)

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• CMB Distortions from Superconducting Cosmic Strings
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• A Search for Neutrino Emission from Fast Radio Bursts with Six Years of IceCube Data
• Cosmic Strings in Hidden Sectors: 2. Cosmological and Astrophysical Signatures
• Superconducting cosmic strings as sources of cosmological fast radio bursts
• Cosmic Strings as Emitters of Extremely High Energy Neutrinos
• Cosmological and astrophysical constraints on superconducting cosmic strings
• Constraints on Superconducting Cosmic Strings from Early Reionization
• IR/UV mixing from local similarity maps of scalar non-Hermitian field theories
• Note on Structure Formation from Cosmic String Wakes
• Cosmic Super-Strings and Kaluza-Klein Modes
• Kinetic Theory and Hydrodynamics of Cosmic Strings
• Fireballs from Superconducting Cosmic Strings
• High Energy Neutrino Astronomy
• Ultra High Energy Neutrinos: Absorption, Thermal Effects and Signatures
• Fluid Mechanics of Strings
• Electromagnetic back-reaction from currents on a straight string