Cosmic PeV Neutrinos and the Sources of Ultrahigh Energy Protons

Abstract

The IceCube experiment recently detected the first flux of high-energy neutrinos in excess of atmospheric backgrounds. We examine whether these neutrinos originate from within the same extragalactic sources as ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Starting from rather general assumptions about spectra and flavors, we find that producing a neutrino flux at the requisite level through pion photoproduction leads to a flux of protons well below the cosmic-ray data at ~10^18 eV, where the composition is light, unless pions/muons cool before decaying. This suggests a dominant class of accelerator that allows for cosmic rays to escape without significant neutrino yields.

10 pages, 7 figures; v2: substantially updated to incorporate new IceCube data and model scenarios; v3: added references, accepted for publication in Physical Review D

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Cited by in corpus (38)

• Constraining High-Energy Cosmic Neutrino Sources: Implications and Prospects
• Neutrinos at IceCube from Heavy Decaying Dark Matter
• Testing the Dark Matter Scenario for PeV Neutrinos Observed in IceCube
• Extreme blazars as counterparts of IceCube astrophysical neutrinos
• Superheavy dark matter and IceCube neutrino signals:bounds on decaying dark matter
• A simplified view of blazars: the neutrino background
• Cosmogenic photon and neutrino fluxes in the Auger era
• Spectral analysis of the high-energy IceCube neutrinos
• Demystifying the PeV Cascades in IceCube: Less (Energy) is More (Events)
• Tidally disrupted stars as a possible origin of both cosmic rays and neutrinos at the highest energies
• A Possible Two-component Flux for the High Energy Neutrino Events at IceCube
• Connecting blazars with ultra high energy cosmic rays and astrophysical neutrinos
• Are gamma-ray bursts the sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays?
• Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
• Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Radio-Bright AGN
• Superheavy Particle Origin of IceCube PeV Neutrino Events
• Tomographic Constraints on High-Energy Neutrinos of Hadronuclear Origin
• A Combined Astrophysical and Dark Matter Interpretation of the IceCube HESE and Throughgoing Muon Events
• Time-dependent neutrino emission from Mrk 421 during flares and predictions for IceCube
• Constraining Superluminal Electron and Neutrino Velocities using the 2010 Crab Nebula Flare and the IceCube PeV Neutrino Events
• W-boson and trident production in TeV--PeV neutrino observatories
• Ultra-high-energy-cosmic-ray hot spots from tidal disruption events
• Self-consistent neutrino and UHE cosmic ray spectra from Mrk 421
• Probing decaying heavy dark matter with the 4-year IceCube HESE data
• The Leptoquark Implication from the CMS and IceCube Experiments
• Boosted Dark Matter and its implications for the features in IceCube HESE data
• Multi-PeV Signals from a New Astrophysical Neutrino Flux Beyond the Glashow Resonance
• R-parity Violating Supersymmetry at IceCube
• IC at IC: IceCube can constrain the intrinsic charm of the proton
• Leptonic and Lepto-Hadronic Modeling of the Nov. 2010 flare from 3C 454.3
• The highest energy neutrinos: first evidence for cosmic origin
• ANTARES Constrains a Blazar Origin of Two IceCube PeV Neutrino Events
• Back-to-Back Black Holes decay Signature at Neutrino Observatories
• Implications of the QCD dynamics and a Super-Glashow astrophysical neutrino flux on the description of ultrahigh energy neutrino data
• Charged Higgs effects in IceCube: PeV events and NSIs
• On the non-detection of Glashow resonance in IceCube
• Early Decay of Peccei-Quinn Fermion and the IceCube Neutrino Events
• Explanation of IceCube spectrum with $\nu \to 3\nu$ neutrino splitting in a $\nu$2HDM model