{
  "id": "1707.04263",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2017-07-13T18:00:02.000Z",
  "updated": "2017-07-13T18:00:02.000Z",
  "title": "High-Energy Neutrinos from Millisecond Magnetars formed from the Merger of Binary Neutron Stars",
  "authors": [
    "Ke Fang",
    "Brian D. Metzger"
  ],
  "comment": "13 pages, 5 figures",
  "categories": [
    "astro-ph.HE"
  ],
  "abstract": "The merger of a neutron star (NS) binary may result in the formation of a long-lived, or indefinitely stable, millisecond magnetar remnant surrounded by a low-mass ejecta shell. A portion of the magnetar's prodigious rotational energy is deposited behind the ejecta in a pulsar wind nebula, powering luminous optical/X-ray emission for hours to days following the merger. Ions in the pulsar wind may also be accelerated to ultra-high energies, providing a coincident source of high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. At early times, the cosmic rays experience strong synchrotron losses; however, after a day or so, pion production through photomeson interaction with thermal photons in the nebula comes to dominate. The pion products initially suffer from synchrotron cooling themselves, but after a few days have sufficient time to decay into energetic leptons and high-energy neutrinos. After roughly a week, the density of background photons decreases sufficiently for cosmic rays to escape the source without secondary production. These competing effects result in a neutrino light curve that peaks on a few day timescale near an energy of $\\sim10^{18}$ eV. This signal may be detectable for individual mergers out to $\\sim$ 10 Mpc by the IceCube Observatory (or up to 100 Mpc by next-generation neutrino telescopes), providing clear evidence for a long-lived NS remnant, the presence of which may otherwise be challenging to identify from the gravitational waves alone. Under the optimistic assumption that a sizable fraction of NS mergers produce long-lived magnetars, the cumulative cosmological neutrino background is estimated to be $\\sim 10^{-8}\\,\\rm GeV\\,cm^{-2}\\,s^{-1}\\,sr^{-1}$ for a NS merger rate of $10^{-7}\\,\\rm Mpc^{-3}\\,yr^{-1}$ (depending also on the magnetar's dipole field strength), overlapping with IceCube's current sensitivity and within the reach of next-generation neutrino telescopes.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2017-07-13T18:00:02.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "binary neutron stars",
      "millisecond magnetar",
      "high-energy neutrinos",
      "mergers produce long-lived magnetars",
      "next-generation neutrino telescopes"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 13,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}