Searching for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Clusters with IceCube

Abstract

Galaxy clusters have the potential to accelerate cosmic rays (CRs) to ultra-high energies via accretion shocks or embedded CR acceleration sites. CRs with energies below the Hillas condition will be confined within the cluster and will eventually interact with the intracluster medium (ICM) gas to produce secondary neutrinos and $\gamma$ rays. Using 9.5 years of muon-neutrino track events from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we report the results of a stacking analysis of 1094 galaxy clusters, with masses $\gtrsim 10^{14}$ \(\textup{M}_\odot\) and redshifts between 0.01 and $\sim$1, detected by the {\it Planck} mission via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. We find no evidence for significant neutrino emission and report upper limits on the cumulative unresolved neutrino flux from massive galaxy clusters after accounting for the completeness of the catalog up to a redshift of 2, assuming three different weighting scenarios for the stacking and three different power-law spectra. Weighting the sources according to mass and distance, we set upper limits at $90\%$ confidence level that constrain the flux of neutrinos from massive galaxy clusters ($\gtrsim 10^{14}$ \(\textup{M}_\odot\)) to be no more than $4.6\%$ of the diffuse IceCube observations at 100~TeV, assuming an unbroken $E^{-2.5}$ power-law spectrum.

12 pages, 3 figures and one table. Updated with accepted version

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• Constraining High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Supernovae with IceCube
• The Diffuse Gamma-Ray Flux from Clusters of Galaxies
• Search for Extended Sources of Neutrino Emission in the Galactic Plane with IceCube
• High-energy neutrino constraints on cosmic-ray re-acceleration in radio halos of massive galaxy clusters
• Time-integrated constraint on neutrino flux of CHIME fast radio burst sources with 10-year IceCube point-source data
• Deciphering the Sources of Cosmic Neutrinos
• Cross-correlating IceCube neutrinos with a large set of galaxy samples around redshift z ~ 1
• First Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Mergers
• Neutrino anisotropy as a probe of extreme astrophysical accelerators