Unified thermal model for photohadronic neutrino production in astrophysical sources

Abstract

High-energy astrophysical neutrino fluxes are, for many applications, modeled as simple power laws as a function of energy. While this is reasonable in the case of neutrino production in hadronuclear $pp$ sources, it typically does not capture the behavior in photohadronic $p\gamma$ sources: in that case, the neutrino spectrum depends on the properties of the target photons the cosmic rays collide with and on possible magnetic-field effects on the secondary pions and muons. We show that the neutrino production from known photohadronic sources can be reproduced by a thermal (black-body) target-photon spectrum if one suitably adjusts the temperature, thanks to multi-pion production processes. This allows discussing neutrino production from most known $p\gamma$ sources, such as gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei and tidal disruption events, in terms of a few parameters. We apply this thermal model to study the sensitivity of different classes of neutrino telescopes to photohadronic sources: we classify the model parameter space according to which experiment is most suitable for detection of a specific source class and demonstrate that different experiment classes, such as dense arrays, conventional neutrino telescopes, or radio-detection experiments, cover different parts of the parameter space. Since the model can also reproduce the flavor and neutrino-antineutrino composition, we study the impact on the track-to-shower ratio and the Glashow resonance.

38 pages, 13 figures; data available at https://github.com/damianofiorillo/Unified-thermal-model

References in corpus (26)

• Characteristics of the diffuse astrophysical electron and tau neutrino flux with six years of IceCube high energy cascade data
• The contribution of Fermi-2LAC blazars to the diffuse TeV-PeV neutrino flux
• A tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino
• Constraining High-Energy Cosmic Neutrino Sources: Implications and Prospects
• Flavor Composition and Energy Spectrum of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Detection of a particle shower at the Glashow resonance with IceCube
• Pinpointing Extragalactic Neutrino Sources in Light of Recent IceCube Observations
• Energy dependent neutrino flavor ratios from cosmic accelerators on the Hillas plot
• High-Energy Neutrino and Gamma-Ray Emission from Tidal Disruption Events
• High-Energy Neutrino Flares From X-Ray Bright and Dark Tidal Disruptions Events
• AGN jets as the origin of UHECRs and perspectives for the detection of astrophysical source neutrinos at EeV energies
• Which is the flavor of cosmic neutrinos seen by IceCube?
• Inferring the flavor of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at their sources
• The Future of High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrino Flavor Measurements
• Multi-wavelength and neutrino emission from blazar PKS 1502+106
• ARIANNA: A New Concept for UHE Neutrino Detection
• AMEGO: Exploring the Extreme Multimessenger Universe
• Magnetic Field and Flavor Effects on the Gamma-Ray Burst Neutrino Flux
• Starburst galaxies strike back: a multi-messenger analysis with Fermi-LAT and IceCube data
• Neutrino Emission from an Off-Axis Jet Driven by the Tidal Disruption Event AT2019dsg
• Astrophysical Neutrino Production Diagnostics with the Glashow Resonance
• Systematic parameter space study for the UHECR origin from GRBs in models with multiple internal shocks
• Using High-Energy Neutrinos As Cosmic Magnetometers
• Detection prospects for high energy neutrino sources from the anisotropic matter distribution in the local universe
• On the energy of the protons producing the very high-energy astrophysical neutrinos
• Assessing the sensitivity of PINGU to effective dark matter-nucleon interactions

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The TeV Diffuse Cosmic Neutrino Spectrum and the Nature of Astrophysical Neutrino Sources
• Interpretation of the observed neutrino emission from three Tidal Disruption Events
• TeV neutrinos and hard X-rays from relativistic reconnection in the corona of NGC 1068
• A magnetized strongly turbulent corona as the source of neutrinos from NGC 1068
• Multi-collision internal shock lepto-hadronic models for energetic GRBs
• Bump-hunting in the diffuse flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Near-future discovery of point sources of ultra-high-energy neutrinos
• Constraints on the hosts of UHECR accelerators
• Multi-messenger High-Energy Signatures of Decaying Dark Matter and the Effect of Background Light
• Two-detector flavor sensitivity to ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Flavor composition of neutrinos from choked gamma-ray bursts
• Magnetar-powered Neutrinos and Magnetic Moment Signatures at IceCube
• Status and Perspectives of Neutrino Physics