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Register a new userUnified thermal model for photohadronic neutrino production in astrophysical sources
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Added by
Damiano Francesco Giuseppe Fiorillo
Publication date
2021
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
Damiano F. G. Fiorillo
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Astrophysical neutrino fluxes are often modeled as power laws of the energy. This is reasonable in the case of hadronic sources, but it does not capture the behavior in photohadronic sources, where the spectrum depends on the properties of the target photons on which protons collide. This limits the possibility of a unified treatment of different sources. In order to overcome this difficulty, we model the target photons by a blackbody spectrum. This model is sufficiently flexible to reproduce neutrino fluxes from known photohadronic sources; we apply it to study the sensitivity of Dense Neutrino Arrays, Neutrino Telescopes and Neutrino Radio Arrays to photohadronic sources. We also classify the flavor composition of the neutrino spectrum in terms of the parameter space. We discuss the interplay with the experiments, studying the changes in the track-to-shower ratio induced by different flavor compositions, both within and outside the region of the Glashow resonance.
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The IceCube Collaboration has observed a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux and recently found evidence for neutrino emission from the blazar TXS 0506+056. These results open a new window into the high-energy universe. However, the source or sources of most of the observed flux of astrophysical neutrinos remains uncertain. Here, a search for steady point-like neutrino sources is performed using an unbinned likelihood analysis. The method searches for a spatial accumulation of muon-neutrino events using the very high-statistics sample of about $497,000$ neutrinos recorded by IceCube between 2009 and 2017. The median angular resolution is $sim1^circ$ at 1 TeV and improves to $sim0.3^circ$ for neutrinos with an energy of 1 PeV. Compared to previous analyses, this search is optimized for point-like neutrino emission with the same flux-characteristics as the observed astrophysical muon-neutrino flux and introduces an improved event-reconstruction and parametrization of the background. The result is an improvement in sensitivity to the muon-neutrino flux compared to the previous analysis of $sim35%$ assuming an $E^{-2}$ spectrum. The sensitivity on the muon-neutrino flux is at a level of $E^2 mathrm{d} N /mathrm{d} E = 3cdot 10^{-13},mathrm{TeV},mathrm{cm}^{-2},mathrm{s}^{-1}$. No new evidence for neutrino sources is found in a full sky scan and in an a priori candidate source list that is motivated by gamma-ray observations. Furthermore, no significant excesses above background are found from populations of sub-threshold sources. The implications of the non-observation for potential source classes are discussed.
We discuss the first applications of our newly developed Monte Carlo event generator SOPHIA to multiparticle photoproduction of relativistic protons with thermal and power law radiation fields. The measured total cross section is reproduced in terms of excitation and decay of baryon resonances, direct pion production, diffractive scattering, and non-diffractive multiparticle production. Non--diffractive multiparticle production is described using a string fragmentation model. We demonstrate that the widely used `$Delta$--approximation for the photoproduction cross section is reasonable only for a restricted set of astrophysical applications. The relevance of this result for cosmic ray propagation through the microwave background and hadronic models of active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts is briefly discussed.
We present the reconstruction of neutrino flavor ratios at astrophysical sources. For distinguishing the pion source and the muon-damped source to the 3$sigma$ level, the neutrino flux ratios, $Requivphi( u_mu)/(phi( u_e)+phi( u_tau))$ and $Sequivphi( u_e)/phi( u_tau)$, need to be measured in accuracies better than 10%.
When muons travel through matter, their energy losses lead to nuclear breakup (spallation) processes. The delayed decays of unstable daughter nuclei produced by cosmic-ray muons are important backgrounds for low-energy astrophysical neutrino experiments, e.g., those seeking to detect solar neutrino or Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB) signals. Even though Super-Kamiokande has strong general cuts to reduce these spallation-induced backgrounds, the remaining rate before additional cuts for specific signals is much larger than the signal rates for kinetic energies of about 6 -- 18 MeV. Surprisingly, there is no published calculation of the production and properties of these backgrounds in water, though there are such studies for scintillator. Using the simulation code FLUKA and theoretical insights, we detail how muons lose energy in water, produce secondary particles, how and where these secondaries produce isotopes, and the properties of the backgrounds from their decays. We reproduce Super-Kamiokande measurements of the total background to within a factor of 2, which is good given that the isotope yields vary by orders of magnitude and that some details of the experiment are unknown to us at this level. Our results break aggregate data into component isotopes, reveal their separate production mechanisms, and preserve correlations between them. We outline how to implement more effective background rejection techniques using this information. Reducing backgrounds in solar and DSNB studies by even a factor of a few could help lead to important new discoveries.
We discuss the reconstruction of neutrino flavor ratios at astrophysical sources through the future neutrino-telescope measurements. Taking the ranges of neutrino mixing parameters $theta_{ij}$ as those given by the current global fit, we demonstrate by a statistical method that the accuracies in the measurements of energy-independent ratios $Requivphi ( u_{mu})/(phi ( u_{e})+phi ( u_{tau}))$ and $Sequivphi ( u_e)/phi ( u_{tau})$ among integrated neutrino flux should both be better than 10% in order to distinguish between the pion source and the muon-damped source at the $3 sigma$ level. The 10% accuracy needed for measuring $R$ and $S$ requires an improved understanding on the background atmospheric neutrino flux to a better than 10% level in the future. We discuss the applicability of our analysis to practical situations that the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux arises from different types of sources and each point source has a neutrino flavor ratio varying with energies. We also discuss the effect of leptonic CP phase on the flavor-ratio reconstruction.
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