Bounds on the origin of extragalactic ultrahigh energy cosmic rays from the IceCube neutrino observations


Abstract in English

We study general implications of the IceCube observations in the energy range from $10^{6}$ GeV to $10^{10}$ GeV for the origin of extragalactic ultrahigh energy cosmic rays assuming that high energy neutrinos are generated by the photomeson production of protons in the extragalactic universe. The PeV-energy neutrino flux observed by IceCube gives strong bounds on the photomeson-production optical depth of protons in their sources and the intensity of the proton component of extragalactic cosmic rays. The neutrino flux implies that extragalactic cosmic-ray sources should have the optical depth greater than $sim 0.01$ and contribute to more than a few percent of the observed bulk of cosmic rays at 10 PeV. If the spectrum of cosmic rays from these extragalactic sources extends well beyond 1 EeV, the neutrino flux indicates that extragalactic cosmic rays are dominant in the observed total cosmic-ray flux at 1 EeV and above, favoring the dip transition model of cosmic rays. The cosmic-ray sources are also required to be efficient neutrino emitters with the optical depth close to unity in this case. The highest energy cosmic-ray ($sim 10^{11}$ GeV) sources should not be strongly evolved with redshift to account for the IceCube observations, suggesting that any cosmic-ray radiation scenarios involving distant powerful astronomical objects with strong cosmological evolution are strongly disfavored. These considerations conclude that none of the known extragalactic astronomical objects can be simultaneously a source of both PeV and trans-EeV energy cosmic rays. We also discuss a possible effect of cosmic-ray propagation in magnetized intergalactic space to the connection between the observed total cosmic-ray flux and neutrino flux.

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