Gamma Ray Bursts from the First Stars: Neutrino Signals

Abstract

If the first (PopIII) stars were very massive, their final fate is to collapse into very massive black holes. Once a proto-black hole has formed into the stellar core, accretion continues through a disk. It is widely accepted, although not confirmed, that magnetic fields drive an energetic jet which produces a burst of TeV neutrinos by photon-meson interaction, and eventually breaks out of the stellar envelope appearing as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). Based on recent numerical simulations and neutrino emission models, we predict the expected neutrino diffuse flux from these PopIII GRBs and compare it with the capabilities of present and planned detectors as AMANDA and IceCube. If beamed into 1% of the sky, we find that the rate of PopIII GRBs is $\le 4\times 10^6$ yr${}^{-1}$. High energy neutrinos from PopIII GRBs could dominate the overall flux in two energy bands [$10^4-10^5$] GeV and [$10^5-10^6$] GeV of neutrino telescopes. The enhanced sensitivities of forthcoming detectors in the high-energy band (AMANDA-II, IceCube) will provide a fundamental insight on the characteristic explosion energies of PopIII GRBs and will constitute a unique probe of the the Initial Mass Function (IMF) of the first stars and of the redshift $z_f$ marking the metallicity-driven transition from a top-heavy to a normal IMF. The current upper limit set by AMANDA-B10 implies that such transition must have occurred not later than $z_f=9.2$ for the most plausible jet energies. Based on such results, we speculate that PopIII GRBs, if not chocked, could be associated with a new class of events detected by BeppoSax, the Fast X-ray Transient (FXTs), which are bright X-ray sources, with peak energies in the 2-10 keV band and durations between 10-200 s.

24 pages, LaTeX, 6 figures, Draft paper submitted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (21)

• The First Stars
• The First Cosmic Structures and their Effects
• The Detectability of the First Stars and Their Cluster Enrichment Signatures
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• Dark matter annihilation effects on the first stars
• Magnetorotational Collapse of Population III Stars
• Magnetorotational collapse of very massive stars to black holes in full general relativity
• Testing Reionization with Gamma Ray Burst Absorption Spectra
• Very High Energy Neutrinos Originating from Kaons in Gamma-Ray Bursts
• The Radio to Infrared Emission of Very High Redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts: Probing Early Star Formation through Molecular and Atomic Absorption Lines
• Diffuse Cosmic Neutrino Background from Population III Stars
• Revisiting the Contributions of Supernova and Hypernova Remnants to the Diffuse High-Energy Backgrounds: Constraints on Very-High-Redshift Injections
• High Energy neutrino signals from the Epoch of Reionization
• UHE neutrinos from Pop III stars: concept and constraints
• High Energy Neutrino Emission from the Earliest Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Origin and Impacts of the First Cosmic Rays
• Gamma-ray bursts as X-ray depth-gauges of the Universe
• Impact of Rotation on Neutrino Emission and Relic Neutrino Background from Population III Stars
• Neutrino production in Population III microquasars
• Detectability of GRB Iron Lines by Swift, Chandra and XMM
• Little Red Dots as Hidden Neutrino Sources