Hidden Cosmic-Ray Accelerators as an Origin of TeV-PeV Cosmic Neutrinos

Kohta Murase, Dafne Guetta, Markus Ahlers
2016 Physical Review Letters  
The latest IceCube data suggest that the all-flavor cosmic neutrino flux may be as large as 10^-7 GeV/cm^2/s/sr around 30 TeV. We show that, if sources of the TeV-PeV neutrinos are transparent to gamma rays with respect to two-photon annihilation, strong tensions with the isotropic diffuse gamma-ray background measured by Fermi are unavoidable, independently of the production mechanism. We further show that, if the IceCube neutrinos have a photohadronic (pgamma) origin, the sources are expected
more » ... to be opaque to 1-100 GeV gamma rays. With these general multimessenger arguments, we find that the latest data suggest a population of cosmic-ray accelerators hidden in GeV-TeV gamma rays as a neutrino origin. Searches for x-ray and MeV gamma-ray counterparts are encouraged, and TeV-PeV neutrinos themselves will serve as special probes of dense source environments.
doi:10.1103/physrevlett.116.071101 pmid:26943524 fatcat:wjbgtcchgvejxj4647fnf2fzpy