Radio blazars: sources of neutrinos from TeV to PeV
Seminars
Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems
Date and Time: Wednesday, 16 December 2020, at 3:00 PM
Venue: Online conference in Zoom
Seminar topic: “Radio blazars: sources of neutrinos from TeV to PeV”
Speaker: Alexander Plavin
Abstract:
High-energy astrophysical neutrinos have been collected by observatories such as IceCube for more than a decade. However, the sources of the majority of these particles remained unknown. Earlier this year we have connected origins of the highest energy neutrinos, above 200 TeV, to radio blazars. Now we expand our analysis to a much wider energy range utilizing public IceCube data that covers seven years. It turns out that IceCube detections directionally coincide with blazars that have bright radio cores on parsec scales. These coincidences are more numerous than could be expected if the distributions were independent: statistical significance is 3.0σ; combined significance together with our previous study is 4.1σ (p=4∗10−5). Thus, bright blazars are associated with neutrinos having energies from TeVs to PeVs. This correlation is driven by a large number of objects: we show that our sample contains at least 70 neutrino associations. We estimate that blazars may explain the entire IceCube astrophysical neutrino flux as derived from muon-track analyses. High-energy neutrinos can be produced within parsec-scale jets in interactions of relativistic protons with self-Compton photons, or photons emitted close to the accretion disk.