The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has detected high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in the TeV-PeV range. These neutrinos have an isotropic distribution on the sky, and therefore, likely originate from extragalactic sources. Active Galactic Nuclei form a class of astronomical objects which are promising neutrino source candidates given their high electromagnetic luminosity and potential ability to accelerate cosmic rays up to energies greater than 10$^{16}$ eV. Interactions of these cosmic rays within the AGN environment are expected to produce both neutrinos and pionic gamma rays. Some hadronic models of AGN emission suggest that such gamma rays can in turn interact with the dense photon fields of AGN and cascade down to hard X-rays and MeV gamma rays. We present an update on the IceCube stacking analysis searching for high-energy neutrinos from hard X-ray sources sampled from the $\textit{Swift}$-BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey.
Recently IceCube collaboration has reported first evidence for the astrophysical neutrinos. Observation corresponds to the total astrophysical neutrino flux of the order of $3 \cdot 10^{-8}$ $GeV/cm^2/s/sr$ in a PeV energy range. Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are natural candidate sources for such neutrinos. To model the neutrino creation in AGNs we study photopion production processes on the radiation field of the Shakura-Sunyaev accretion disks in the black hole vicinity. We show that this model can explain detected neutrino flux and avoids, at the same time, existing constraints from the gam…
On 22 September 2017, IceCube reported a high-energy neutrino event which was found to be coincident with a flaring blazar, TXS 0506+056. This multi-messenger observation hinted at blazars contributing to the observed high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and raised a need for extensive correlation studies. Recent work shows that the internal absorption of gamma rays, and their interactions intrinsic to the source and with the extragalactic background, will cause a lack of energetic gamma-ray and neutrino correlation while hinting towards a correlation between neutrinos and lower photon energy o…
Neutrino events from IceCube have recently been associated with multiple astrophysical sources. Interestingly, these likely detections represent three distinct astrophysical source types: active galactic nuclei (AGN), blazars, and tidal disruption events (TDE). Here we compute the expected contributions of AGNs, blazars and TDEs to the overall cosmic neutrino flux detected by IceCube based on the associated events, IceCube's sensitivity, and the source types' astrophysical properties. We find that, despite being the most commonly identified sources, blazars cannot contribute more than 11% of t…
The origin of the astrophysical neutrino flux reported by the IceCube Collaboration remains an open question. In this study, we use three years of publicly available IceCube data to search for evidence of neutrino emission from the blazars and non-blazar Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) contained the Fermi 4LAC catalog. We find no evidence that these sources produce high-energy neutrinos, and conclude that blazars can produce no more than 15% of IceCube's observed flux. The constraint we derive on the contribution from non-blazar AGN, which are less luminous and more numerous than blazars, is sign…
Deciphering the IceCube Diffuse Neutrino Observations via AGN Variability
School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学物理与天文学院）；State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学物理海洋学国家重点实验室）；Joint Laboratory for Frontier Interdisciplinary Research in Ocean Science, Mathematics and Physics, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学海洋科学、数学和物理前沿交叉研究联合实验室）；Department of Physics, University of Johannesburg（约翰内斯堡大学物理系）
With infrared luminosities $L_{\mathrm{IR}} \geq 10^{12} L_{\odot}$, Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs) are the most luminous objects in the infrared sky. They are predominantly powered by starburst regions with star-formation rates $\gtrsim 100~ M_{\odot}~ \mathrm{yr^{-1}}$. ULIRGs can also host an active galactic nucleus (AGN). Both the starburst and AGN environments contain plausible hadronic accelerators, making ULIRGs candidate neutrino sources. We present the results of an IceCube stacking analysis searching for high-energy neutrinos from a representative sample of 75 ULIRGs with …
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. In 2013 IceCube discovered high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and has more recently found compelling evidence for a flaring blazar being a source of high-energy neutrinos. However, as blazars can only be responsible for a small fraction of the observed neutrino flux, the sources responsible for the majority of the detected neutrinos remain unknown. In this work, we explore the possibility that the observed neutrino flux is produced in the cores of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Various models have predicted neutrino …
The recent discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos by the IceCube neutrino observatory opens up a new field in physics, the field of neutrino astronomy. Using the IceCube neutrino detector we plan to search for high-energy neutrinos emitted from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), since AGN are believed to be one of the most promising sources of the most energetic cosmic rays and hence of high-energy neutrinos. We discuss a specific type of AGN which we plan to investigate in more detail with data obtained by the IceCube observatory. The main properties of the AGN category in which we are interest…
IceCube is a km^3 scale neutrino detector being constructed deep in the Antarctic ice. When complete, IceCube will consist of 4800 optical modules deployed on 80 strings between 1450 and 2450 m of depth. During the 2007-2008 data taking season, 22 strings were operational. This configuration is already much larger than previous neutrino telescopes and provides better sensitivity to point sources of high energy (>1 TeV) neutrino emission. Such astrophysical objects are leading candidates for the acceleration of cosmic rays. We describe the IceCube detector and present the methods and results of…
We investigate the possibility that radio-bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) are responsible for the TeV--PeV neutrinos detected by IceCube. We use an unbinned maximum-likelihood-ratio method, 10 years of IceCube muon-track data, and 3388 radio-bright AGN selected from the Radio Fundamental Catalog. None of the AGN in the catalog have a large global significance. The two most significant sources have global significance of $\simeq$ 1.5$σ$ and 0.8$σ$, though 4.1$σ$ and 3.8$σ$ local significance. Our stacking analyses show no significant correlation between the whole catalog and IceCube neutrin…
The IceCube neutrino observatory, a cubic-kilometer particle detector at the South Pole, first announced the discovery of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos in the TeV-PeV range in 2013, followed in 2017 by the detection of a high-energy neutrino event in temporal and directional correlation with the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056. This observation, combined with archival neutrino detections in 2014-2015, has provided compelling evidence for the detection of the first high-energy astrophysical neutrino source. A promising way of detecting additional sources is to correlate n…
The IceCube detector, which is embedded in the glacial ice at the geographic South Pole, is the first neutrino telescope to comprise a volume of one cubic kilometer. The search for neutrinos of astrophysical origin is among the primary goals of IceCube. Point source candidates include Galactic objects such as supernova remnants (SNRs) as well as extragalactic objects such as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). Offline and online searches for transient sources like GRBs and supernovae (SNe) are presented. Triggered searches use satellite measurements from Fermi, SWIFT and …
Searches for point sources of astrophysical neutrinos and related measurements: Searches for steady and time-variable sources; Follow-up programs; AGNs; GRBs; Moon shadow; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
We test the recently proposed idea that outflows associated with Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) could be neutrino emitters in two complementary ways. First, we cross-correlate a list of 94 "bona fide" AGN outflows with the most complete and updated repository of IceCube neutrinos currently publicly available, assembled by us for this purpose. It turns out that AGN with outflows matched to an IceCube neutrino have outflow and kinetic energy rates, and bolometric powers larger than those of AGN with outflows not matched to neutrinos. Second, we carry out a statistical analysis on a catalogue of O …
Diffuse neutrino flux from relativistic reconnection in AGN coronae
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波帝斯特里安大学）；Institute of Accelerating Systems & Applications（加速系统与应用研究所）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Napoli（意大利国家核物理研究所（INFN）那不勒斯分部）；National Observatory of Athens（雅典国家天文台）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute（计算天体物理学中心，平顿研究所）
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are believed to be one of the main source candidates for the high-energy (TeV-PeV) cosmic neutrino flux recently discovered by the IceCube neutrino observatory. Nevertheless, several correlation studies between AGN and the cosmic neutrinos detected by IceCube show no significance. Therefore, in this article we consider a specific sub-class of AGN for which an increased neutrino production is expected. This sub-class contains AGN for which their high-energy jet is pointing toward Earth. Furthermore, we impose the condition that the jet is obscured by gas or dust sur…
The recent discovery of a diffuse neutrino flux up to PeV energies raises the question of which populations of astrophysical sources contribute to this diffuse signal. One extragalactic candidate source population to produce high-energy neutrinos are Blazars. We present results from a likelihood analysis searching for cumulative neutrino emission from Blazar populations selected with the 2nd Fermi-LAT AGN catalog (2LAC) using an IceCube data set that has been optimized for the detection of individual sources. In contrast to previous searches with IceCube, the investigated populations contain u…
The detection of astrophysical very high energy (VHE) neutrinos in the range of TeV-PeV energies by the IceCube observatory has opened a new season in high energy astrophysics. Energies ~PeV imply that the neutrinos are originated from sources where cosmic rays (CRs) can be accelerated up to ~ 10^{17}eV. Recently, we have shown that the observed TeV gamma-rays from radio-galaxies may have a hadronic origin in their nuclear region and in such a case this could lead to neutrino production. In this paper we show that relativistic protons accelerated by magnetic reconnection in the core region of …
Recent reports of possible correlations between high energy neutrinos observed by IceCube and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) activity sparked a burst of publications that attempt to predict the neutrino flux of these sources. However, often rather crude estimates are used to derive the neutrino rate from the observed photon spectra. In this work neutrino fluxes were computed in a wide parameter space. The starting point of the model was a representation of the full spectral energy density (SED) of \textit{3C 279}. The time-dependent hybrid model that was used for this study takes into account th…
The observed spectrum of ultrahigh energy neutrinos at IceCube might be indicative of absorption of such neutrinos in ultralight dark matter halos. We point out that various features of this spectrum can be explained by such absorptions. For a light $Z^\prime$-mediated $t$-channel interaction between dark matter and neutrinos, we propose a novel mechanism of absorption of these neutrinos at particular energies. This can save the models of AGN predicting large neutrino flux at energies more than a PeV.
The largest Solar flare have been recorded in gamma flash and hard spectra up to tens GeV energy. The present building and upgrade of Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) and IceCube (as well as Deep Core, PINGU) neutrino detectors do offer a novel way to largest trace of solar Flare: their sudden anti-neutrino (or neutrino) flare made by proton scattering and pion decays via Delta resonance production. These signals might be observable at largest flare by HK via soft spectra up to tens- hundred MeV energy and by IceCube-PINGU at higher, GeV up to hundred GeV, energies. We show the expected rate of signals f…
The IceCube Collaboration has observed 37 neutrino events in the energy range $30\, TeV\leq E_ν \leq 2$ PeV and the sources of these neutrinos are unknown. Here we have shown that positions of 12 high energy blazars and the position of the FR-I galaxy Centaurus A, coincide within the error circles of ten IceCube events, the later being in the error circle of the highest energy event so far observed by IceCube. Two of the above blazars are simultaneously within the error circles of the Telescope Array hotspot and one IceCube event. We found that the blazar H2356-309 is within the error circles …
The uncertainty region of the highly energetic neutrino IceCube200107A includes 3HSP J095507.9+355101 ($z$~=~0.557), an extreme blazar, which was detected in a high, very hard, and variable X-ray state shortly after the neutrino arrival. Following a detailed multi-wavelength investigation, we confirm that the source is a genuine BL Lac, contrary to TXS 0506+056, the first source so far associated with IceCube neutrinos, which is a "masquerading" BL Lac. As in the case of TXS0506+056, 3HSP J095507.9+355101 is also way off the so-called "blazar sequence". We consider 3HSP J095507.9+355101 a poss…
In this paper we report the results of a $γ$-ray study of IceCube's extraterrestrial neutrino candidates detected as track-like events. Using 70 months of Fermi-LAT observations, a likelihood analysis of all $1-300$ GeV photons within 5 degrees of the track-like neutrino candidates' origin was undertaken, to search for spatially coincident $γ$-ray emission. One of IceCube's HESE track events was found to be spatially coincident with a $γ$-ray bright active galactic nucleus (AGN), PKS 0723-008. We find however, that the chance probability for Fermi-LAT detected AGN to be spatially coincident wi…
Powerful jets and outflows generated in tidal disruption events (TDEs) around supermassive black holes have been suggested to be possible sites producing high-energy neutrinos, but it is unclear whether such environment can provide the bulk of the neutrinos detected by the IceCube Observatory. In this work, by considering realistic limits on the non-thermal emission power of a TDE jet and the birth rate of the TDEs with jets pointing towards us, we show that it is hard to use the jetted TDE population to explain the flux and the isotropic arrival directions of the observed TeV-PeV neutrinos. T…
Diagnosing the AGN population origin of TeV neutrinos with their spatial correlation
School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University（南京大学天文与空间科学学院）；Key laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics (Nanjing University), Ministry of Education（现代天文学和天体物理学教育部重点实验室（南京大学））；Tianfu Cosmic Ray Research Center（天府宇宙线研究中心）
Evidence for high-energy astrophysical PeV neutrinos has been found in the IceCube experiment from an analysis with a 7.5 year (2010 - 2017) data. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are among the most prominent objects in the universe, and are widely speculated to be emitters of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays with proton domination. Based on the standard two-step LLCD mechanism of particle acceleration, a transformation of energy occurs from AGN's central super-massive black hole (SMBH) rotation to high-energy protons. Protons can be accelerated up to $\sim 0.1$ EeV energies and above, and migh…
We investigate the IceCube detection potential of very high energy neutrinos from blazars, for different classes of "hadronic" models, taking into account the limits imposed on the neutrino flux by the recent Fermi telescope observations. Assuming the observed gamma-ray emission is produced by the decay of neutral pions from proton-proton interactions, the measurement of the time-averaged spectral characteristics of blazars in the GeV energy band imposes upper limits on the time-averaged neutrino flux. Comparing these upper limits to the 5 sigma discovery threshold of IceCube for different neu…
Since the discovery of a neutrino flux in excess of the atmospheric background by the IceCube Collaboration, searches for the astrophysical sources have been ongoing. Due to the steeply falling background towards higher energies, the PeV events detected in three years of IceCube data are the most likely ones to be of extraterrestrial origin. Even excluding the PeV events detected so far, the neutrino flux is well above the atmospheric background, so it is likely that a number of sub-PeV events originate from the same astrophysical sources that produce the PeV events. We study the high-energy p…
Association of the IceCube neutrinos with CAZ blazar light curves
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA)（芬兰ESO天文中心）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Aalto University Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering（阿尔托大学电子与纳米工程系的）；Institute of Astrophysics, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas（希腊研究与技术基金会天体物理研究所）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Located at the South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the world largest neutrino telescope, instrumenting one cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice at a depth between 1450m to 2450m. In 2013 IceCube reported the first observations of a diffuse astrophysical high-energy neutrino flux. Although the IceCube Collaboration has identified more than 100 high-energy neutrino events, the origin of this neutrino flux is still not known. Blazars, a subclass of Active Galactic Nuclei and one of the most powerful classes of objects in the Universe, have long been considered promising sources of high en…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory announced thirty-seven candidate events observed with deposited energies above $\sim$ 30 TeV with three-year dataset, more than expected from atmospheric backgrounds. We discuss the detectability of the Fermi Bubbles (FB) by IceCube and show that up to 6 -- 7 of the 37 events could originate from the FB. If the observed gamma rays from the FB are created due to baryonic mechanism, high-energy ($>$ GeV) neutrinos should be emitted as a counterpart. These neutrinos should be detectable as shower- or track-like events at a Km$^3$ neutrino detector. For a hard prim…
IceCube has observed an excess of neutrino events over expectations from the isotropic background from the direction of NGC 1068. The excess is inconsistent with background expectations at the level of $2.9σ$ after accounting for statistical trials. Even though the excess is not statistical significant yet, it is interesting to entertain the possibility that it corresponds to a real signal. Assuming a single power-law spectrum, the IceCube Collaboration has reported a best-fit flux $ϕ_ν\sim 3 \times 10^{-8} (E_ν/{\rm TeV})^{-3.2}~({\rm GeV \, cm^2 \, s})^{-1}$, where $E_ν$ is the neutrino ener…
In this work we use a multi-messenger approach to determine if the high energy diffuse neutrino flux observed by the IceCube Observatory can originate from $γ$-ray sources powered by Cosmic Rays interactions with gas. Typical representatives of such sources are Starburst and Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies. Using the three most recent calculations of the non-blazar contribution to the extragalactic $γ$-ray background measured by the Fermi-LAT collaboration, we find that a hard power-law spectrum with spectral index $α\leq 2.12$ is compatible with all the estimations for the allowed contributi…
In ten years of observations, the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed a neutrino sky in tension with previous expectations for neutrino point source emissions. Astrophysical objects associated with hadronic processes might act as production sites for neutrinos, observed as point sources at Earth. Instead, a nearly isotropic flux of astrophysical neutrinos is observed up to PeV energies, prompting a reassessment of the assumed transport and production physics. This work applies a new physical explanation for neutrino production from populations of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and starburs…
The recent UHECR events by AUGER and the Telescope Array (TA) suggested that wide clusterings as the North and South, named Hot Spot, are related to near AGNs such as the one in M82 and Cen A. In the same frame since 2008 we assumed that the UHECR are made by light and lightest nuclei to explain the otherwise embarrassing absence of the huge nearby Virgo cluster, absence due to the fragility and the opacity of lightest nuclei by photo-dissociation from Virgo distances. Moreover UHECR map exhibits a few narrow clustering, some near the galactic plane, as toward SS 433 and on the opposite side o…
We have determined the currently allowed regions of the parameter spaces of two representative models of diffuse neutrino flux from active galactic nuclei (AGN): one by Koers & Tinyakov (KT) and another by Becker & Biermann (BB). Our observable has been the number of upgoing muon-neutrinos expected in the 86-string IceCube detector, after 5 years of exposure, in the range 10^5 < E/GeV < 10^8. We have used the latest estimated discovery potential of the IceCube-86 array at the 5-sigma level to determine the lower boundary of the regions, while for the upper boundary we have used either the AMAN…
Searching for dark matter signals with high energy astrophysical neutrinos in IceCube
University of Johannesburg（约翰内斯堡大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；TRIUMF（特利昂夫实验室）；The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS)（国家理论与计算科学研究所）
The recent study on the the 6-year up-going muon neutrinos by the IceCube Collaboration support the hypothesis of a two-component scenario explaining the diffuse TeV-PeV neutrino flux. Once a hard astrophysical power-law is considered, an excess in the IceCube data is shown in the energy range 10-100 TeV (low-energy excess}). By means of a statistical analysis on the neutrino energy spectrum and on the angular distribution of neutrino arrival directions, we characterize a two-component neutrino flux where decaying/annihilating Dark Matter particles provide a contribution to the IceCube observa…
Correlation Between Hard X-Ray and Cosmic Neutrino Sources: From Obscured AGN to Blazars
ELTE Eötvös Loránd University（厄特沃什·罗兰大学）；HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences（匈牙利研究与教育网络地球科学与天文学研究中心）；Ruhr University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）；Universidad Diego Portales（迭戈·波特莱斯大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；University of Wisconsin, Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
The cosmic neutrino flux recently discovered by IceCube will be instrumental in probing the highest-energy astrophysical processes. Nevertheless, the origin of these neutrinos is still unknown. While it would be more straightforward to identify a transient, or galactic source class, finding a population of distant, continuous sources is challenging. We introduce a source-type classification technique that incorporates all available information from catalogs of source candidates. We show that IceCube-Gen2 can statistically establish the origin of cosmic neutrinos even for the most challenging s…
Clusters of galaxies -- with their turbulent magnetic fields and abundant matter content -- are a promising class of potential neutrino sources. Cosmic rays accelerated within the large-scale shocks,Active GalacticNuclei (AGN), or both can be confined in galaxy clusters over cosmological timescales and produce a steady flux of neutrinos in secondary interactions. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has detected a diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. After ten years of operations, however, the origin of this flux remains largely unconstrained. In this work, we perform a stacked sea…
