Neutrino emission from high-energy component gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts have the potential to produce the particle energies (up to $10^{21}$ eV) and the energy budget ($10^{44}\mathrm{ergy}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}\mathrm{Mp}{\mathrm{c}}^{-3}$) to accommodate the spectrum of the highest energy cosmic rays; on the other hand, there is no observational evidence yet that they accelerate hadrons. Fermi recently observed two bursts that exhibit a power-law high-energy extension of the typical (Band) spectrum that extends to $\sim 30$ GeV. On the basis of fireball phenomenology we argue that they, along with GRB941017 observed by EGRET in 1994, show indirect evidence for considerable baryon loading. Since the detection of neutrinos is the only unambiguous way to establish that GRBs accelerate cosmic rays, we use two methods to estimate the neutrino flux produced when the baryons interact with fireball photons to produce charged pions and neutrinos. While the number of events expected from the Fermi bursts is small, we conclude that an event like GRB941017 will be detected by IceCube if gamma-ray bursts are indeed the sources of the cosmic rays.

Submitted to ApJ Letters

References in corpus (6)

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• Fermi Observations of GRB 090902B: A Distinct Spectral Component in the Prompt and Delayed Emission
• Evidence of an initially magnetically dominated outflow in GRB 080916C
• Hadronic Models for the Extra Spectral Component in the short GRB 090510
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Role of Stochastic Acceleration in the Prompt Emission of Gamma-Ray Bursts: Application to Hadronic Injection
• Bounding the Time Delay between High-energy Neutrinos and Gravitational-wave Transients from Gamma-ray Bursts
• Impact of Secondary Acceleration in Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Constraints on The Hadronic Content of Gamma Ray Bursts
• High Energy Neutrino Emission from the Earliest Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Fermi Limit on the Neutrino Flux from Gamma-ray Bursts
• The neutrino velocity anomaly as an explanation of the missing observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRB
• IceCube: Neutrino Physics from GeV - PeV