0000000000530442
AUTHOR
E. Litzinger
ANTARES constrains a blazar origin of two IceCube PeV neutrino events
Abstract Context. The source(s) of the neutrino excess reported by the IceCube Collaboration is unknown. The TANAMI Collaboration recently reported on the multiwavelength emission of six bright, variable blazars which are positionally coincident with two of the most energetic IceCube events. Objects like these are prime candidates to be the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays, and thus of associated neutrino emission. Aims. We present an analysis of neutrino emission from the six blazars using observations with the ANTARES neutrino telescope. Methods. The standard methods of the ANTARES candidate list search are applied to six years of data to search for an excess of muons and hence th…
TANAMI Blazars in the IceCube PeV Neutrino Fields
The IceCube Collaboration has announced the discovery of a neutrino flux in excess of the atmospheric background. Due to the steeply falling atmospheric background spectrum, events at PeV energies are most likely of extraterrestrial origin. We present the multiwavelength properties of the six radio brightest blazars positionally coincident with these events using contemporaneous data of the TANAMI blazar sample, including high-resolution images and spectral energy distributions. Assuming the X-ray to {\gamma}-ray emission originates in the photoproduction of pions by accelerated protons, the integrated predicted neutrino luminosity of these sources is large enough to explain the two detecte…
Coincidence of a high-fluence blazar outburst with a PeV-energy neutrino event
The discovery of extraterrestrial very-high-energy neutrinos by the IceCube collaboration has launched a quest for the identification of their astrophysical sources. Gamma-ray blazars have been predicted to yield a cumulative neutrino signal exceeding the atmospheric background above energies of 100 TeV, assuming that both the neutrinos and the gamma-ray photons are produced by accelerated protons in relativistic jets. Since the background spectrum falls steeply with increasing energy, the individual events with the clearest signature of being of an extraterrestrial origin are those at PeV energies. Inside the large positional-uncertainty fields of the first two PeV neutrinos detected by Ic…