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Detecting Cosmic Neutrino Counterparts with Next-Generation Gamma-Ray Telescopes

Presentation #109.01 in the session “AGN and Quasars 1”.

Published onJan 11, 2021
Detecting Cosmic Neutrino Counterparts with Next-Generation Gamma-Ray Telescopes

The detection of the neutrino event IceCube-170922A coincident in direction and time with the flaring blazar TXS 0506+056 detected by Fermi-LAT lends support to the possibility that flaring blazars may be the source of the high-energy astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. If confirmed, this may also have significant implications for the origin of high-energy cosmic ray acceleration. However, the optimal conditions for neutrino production in many physical scenarios are expected to be mostly opaque to high-energy gamma rays, as the GeV emission is reprocessed down to the MeV band. Currently, the MeV band is the least explored region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Using a toy model of neutrino production through proton-gamma-ray interactions in blazar jets we used MEGAlib to simulate the observed emission by the next-generation MeV telescope AMEGO. We find that AMEGO would be sensitive to the reprocessed electromagnetic counterpart of the neutrino production, indicating that a next generation MeV telescope may provide the key data necessary to finally understand the nature of the high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and cosmic rays.

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