paper

Revisiting Disk Winds in Active Galactic Nuclei as an Origin of Cosmic Gamma-ray and Neutrino Backgrounds

arXiv:2606.17490 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae7d28

Abstract

The origin of the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) and the cosmic gamma-ray background (CGB) remains uncertain. Accretion disk winds driven by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) have been proposed as possible contributors, but their predicted background levels depend sensitively on poorly constrained wind energetics and ambient densities. We revisit the AGN disk-wind scenario by constructing a lepto-hadronic wind model calibrated with radio and GeV gamma-ray data of nearby Fermi-LAT-detected Seyfert galaxies. In our framework, cosmic rays accelerated both at wind-driven forward and reverse shocks produce synchrotron, external-Compton, and hadronic emission. We also incorporate recent XRISM constraints on wind parameters. Applying our calibrated lepto-hadronic models to an AGN population synthesis model, we find that disk winds contribute at most of the CGB above 10 GeV and of the CNB around 100 TeV, suggesting that they are unlikely to dominate both backgrounds. Finally, we identify nearby Seyfert galaxies hosting ultrafast outflows as promising targets for future TeV gamma-ray and TeVPeV neutrino observations, which would offer firm tests of the disk-wind scenario.

26 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (51)