How bright can the brightest neutrino source be? [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02165


After the discovery of extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos, the next major goal of neutrino telescopes will be identifying astrophysical objects that produce them. However, the flux of the brightest source $F_{\rm max}$ cannot be probed by studying the diffuse neutrino intensity. We aim at constraining $F_{\rm max}$ by adopting a broken power-law flux distribution, a hypothesis supported by the observed properties of any generic astrophysical sources. The first estimate of $F_{\rm max}$ comes from the fact that we can only observe one universe, and hence, the expected number of sources above $F_{\rm max}$ cannot be too small compared to one. For abundant source classes such as starburst galaxies, this one-source constraint yields a value of $F_{\rm max}$ that is an order of magnitude lower than the current upper limits from point-source searches. We also derive upper limits on $F_{\rm max}$ from the fact that the angular power spectrum is consistent with neutrino shot noise yet. This limit will improve nearly quadratically with exposure, and therefore provide a powerful probe for rare sources such as blazars with the next generation of neutrino telescopes.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Ando, M. Feyereisen and M. Fornasa
Tue, 10 Jan 17
15/75

Comments: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Phys.Rev.D