1307.2793 (Walter Winter)

Photohadronic Origin of the TeV-PeV Neutrinos Observed in IceCube    [PDF]

Walter Winter

We perform an unbiased search of the origin of the recently observed 28 events above ~30 TeV in the IceCube neutrino observatory, assuming that these are (apart from the atmospheric background) of astrophysical origin produced by photohadronic interactions. Instead of relying on the normalization of the neutrino flux, we demonstrate that spectral shape and flavor composition can be used to constrain or identify the source class. We find that the lack of observed events with energies much larger than PeV points towards sources with strong magnetic fields, which do not exhibit a direct correlation between highest nucleon and neutrino energies. While AGNs are still allowed as possible source class at about the 3sigma confidence level from current data, we show that IceCube can rule out that the observed neutrinos stem from the sources of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (including AGNs) with a factor of ten increased statistics at more than 5sigma if the current observations are confirmed. A possible caveat are sources with strong magnetic fields and high Lorentz factors, such as magnetic energy dominated GRBs.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.2793